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Fake robots! They're fake! Yay!
Jul. 13th, 2011 08:53 pmA few years ago, spurred by an old children's book illustration on the Paleo-Future blog, I mentioned two prominent fake robots of the Sixties and Seventies, Miss Honeywell and Quasar Industries' Klatu. Here's more!
Paleo-Future just posted an article with a little more information on the Miss Honeywell magic trick, an illusion in which a magician appeared to assemble a woman in a creepy-looking robot costume out of mannequin parts. It was staged as a promotion for various technology or appliance companies, and the gimmick was always that the robot woman was advertised as a new product being demonstrated by a company engineer.
I've been reminded that a version of the same trick was actually used as a special effect in a movie, Ib Melchior's The Time Travelers. Several of the scenes in that movie used what amounted to stage-magic tricks in place of cinematic special effects. I guess it was economical.
Here's a Modern Mechanix post of an April 1978 Interface Age article on the Quasar robot. The author of the article claims in a comment on the blog post that it was intended as an April Fool's joke, though, as he acknowledges, the head of the company genuinely took in a lot of people and I personally remember their impending domestic-robot release being widely touted in the media. The main revenue stream seems to have been more or less the same as Miss Honeywell's, the use of the robot (in this case, actually an automaton controlled by a guy behind a curtain) as a promotional gimmick at trade shows and product demonstrations.
The detail here that really takes me back to 1978 is Reichelt's mention of bubble memory as the next big technological step. For a little while, it seemed like the future of nonvolatile data storage was going to be a solid-state component with no moving parts, like the move to flash memory that happened decades later. I remember being excited that, real soon now, Atari was going to release a bubble-memory module to replace the Atari 400/800's data cassette recorder. What happened instead was that disk drives of various types jumped ahead and dominated for the next 25 years.
Paleo-Future just posted an article with a little more information on the Miss Honeywell magic trick, an illusion in which a magician appeared to assemble a woman in a creepy-looking robot costume out of mannequin parts. It was staged as a promotion for various technology or appliance companies, and the gimmick was always that the robot woman was advertised as a new product being demonstrated by a company engineer.
I've been reminded that a version of the same trick was actually used as a special effect in a movie, Ib Melchior's The Time Travelers. Several of the scenes in that movie used what amounted to stage-magic tricks in place of cinematic special effects. I guess it was economical.
Here's a Modern Mechanix post of an April 1978 Interface Age article on the Quasar robot. The author of the article claims in a comment on the blog post that it was intended as an April Fool's joke, though, as he acknowledges, the head of the company genuinely took in a lot of people and I personally remember their impending domestic-robot release being widely touted in the media. The main revenue stream seems to have been more or less the same as Miss Honeywell's, the use of the robot (in this case, actually an automaton controlled by a guy behind a curtain) as a promotional gimmick at trade shows and product demonstrations.
The detail here that really takes me back to 1978 is Reichelt's mention of bubble memory as the next big technological step. For a little while, it seemed like the future of nonvolatile data storage was going to be a solid-state component with no moving parts, like the move to flash memory that happened decades later. I remember being excited that, real soon now, Atari was going to release a bubble-memory module to replace the Atari 400/800's data cassette recorder. What happened instead was that disk drives of various types jumped ahead and dominated for the next 25 years.