Word: robots
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...electronic toys, lifting ideas from the world of automation and guided missiles, are bound to dazzle adults as well as children. Among the startlers: "The Brain" ($11.95), a missile-shooting, robot-manned car with an electronic circuit built into the robot's head, put out by St. Louis' Jay V. Zimmerman Co., and remote-controlled buses and boats imported from Japan. "The Brain" can be preset to scoot about, turn and dodge on its preordered course, and fire its plastic missiles automatically. The buses and boats can be started, stopped and turned right or left by radio signals...
Perhaps, monetarily speaking, a Westinghouse robot does cost more than a child. Our last baby cost me months of illness and $1,500. How do I stack up with Westinghouse production...
...products other than "toys" came out of the meetings. Often, Campbell would come to town, the "Society" would meet, and the following month Astounding Science Fiction would contain a story about robot brains and thinking machines. Once, Ted Kalin, who now works for Project "Lincoln," and Bill Burkhardt, regular "members" at large, actually built a large logic computer which could tackle intricate logical problems with great ease. Nothing much came of the thing, except that several scientists wore satisfied grins for a few months...
...into them, like the clock radio and the electronic "brain." Batteau, who teaches Engineering 200, affectionately called "Applied Science Fiction" by its devotees, has great hopes for the future of information machines. But, he cautions, the information which humans handle is so large that he doubts whether an anthropomorphic robot will ever be built. There is however, just the chance that...
...once-human being, thus controlled, would be the cheapest of machines to create and operate. The cost of building even a simple robot, like the Westinghouse mechanical man, is probably ten times that of bearing and raising a child...