On April 30, 1939, Elektro, one of the most famous robots in history, made its debut. It was more than two meters tall and weighed 118 kilos. He had a 700-word vocabulary – even though his responses were pre-recorded; and he could perform twenty-six different kinds of actions (here a video in which he himself lists them) such as walking, talking, counting, singing, blowing a balloon until it burst … Even if what he became a celebrity for was still another : to smoke. Elektro was the first smoker robot.
The debut took place at the 1939 New York World‘s Fair which, in fact, opened its doors that day. The theme of the fair was “the world of tomorrow” and Elektro was one of the main attractions. It had been built between 1937 and 1938 by Westinghouse Electric, which already had two robots to its credit, but what Elektro could do had not yet been seen. He introduced himself like this: “Ladies and gentlemen, he will be very happy to tell you my story. I’m a smart guy and has a brain of 48 electrical relays ”. And then: “My brain is bigger than yours,” which was technically true since it weighed 25 pounds.
In the first days of the fair, Westinghouse shot a promotional video (“The Middleton family at the New York World‘s Fair”) in which we see a man interacting with the robot in front of a crowd of onlookers, and at a certain point Elektro starts to to smoke. Millions of people admired him.
The following year Elektro returned to the fair in the company of the first robot dog, Sparko. The two together were able to do a small twenty-minute show that was repeated every hour. With the outbreak of World War II Elektro ended up disassembled in several boxes in a Westinghouse warehouse in Ohio until it was found by a child, the son of an engineer who worked there: first he found the head and then convinced his father to open the other boxes to reassemble the robot. A second life began for Elektro: after the war ended, he toured the United States for more than ten years when he became a static attraction of a theme park in California. But his charm soon disappeared.
Again it ended up disassembled in a warehouse where it was fished out for display at the Mansfield Memorial Museum, Ohio, where it still stands today.