Eric the robot wowed the crowds. He stood and bowed and answered questions as blue sparks shot from his metallic teeth. The British creation was such a hit he went on tour around the world. When he arrived in New York, in 1929, a theatre nightwatchman was so alarmed he pulled out a gun and shot at him.
The curators at London’s Science Museum hope for a less extreme reaction when they open Robots, their latest exhibition, on Wednesday. The collection of more than 100 objects is a treasure trove of delights: a miniature iron man with moving joints; a robotic swan that enthralled Mark Twain; a tiny metal woman with a wager cup who is propelled by a mechanism hidden up her skirt.
The pieces are striking and must have dazzled in their day. Ben Russell, the lead curator, points out that most people would not have seen a clock when they first clapped eyes on one exhibit, a 16th century automaton of a monk, who trundled along, moved his lips, and beat his chest in contrition. It was surely mesmerising to the audiences of 1560. “Arthur C Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Russell says. “Well, this is where it all started.”
In every chapter of the 500-year story, robots have held a mirror to human society. Some of the earliest devices brought the Bible to life. One model of Christ on the cross rolls his head and oozes wooden blood from his side as four figures reach up. The mechanisation of faith must have drawn the congregations as much as any sermon.
But faith was not the only focus. Through clockwork animals and human figurines, model makers explored whether humans were simply conscious machines. They brought order to the universe with orreries and astrolabes. The machines became more lighthearted in the enlightened 18th century, when automatons of a flute player, a writer, and a defecating duck all made an appearance. A century later, the style was downright rowdy, with drunken aristocrats, preening dandies and the disturbing life of a sausage from farm to mouth all being recreated as automata.
For all the praise the machines received, the rise of the robots made people uneasy. Automated looms and spinning machines had already replaced skilled craftsmen and women when Maria, the first blockbuster humanoid in Fritz Lang’s 1927 film, Metropolis, questioned the place of humans in a world overrun by machines. “If you create a mechanised economy, what is the position of workers in that? You become slaves to the machines,” Russell says. “You work all round the clock just to keep them running.”
The first tinplate toy robots hit the shelves in the 1930s and helped shape people’s expectations of the world to come. While many were pitched as helpers or friendly space travellers, others carried guns and lasers. On the box, Atomic Man Robot wanders the remains of a city beneath a nuclear mushroom cloud. The adults had their own toys, of course. Though Eric the robot went AWOL – presumed dismantled – after his dicey world tour, the Science Museum built a replica for the exhibition. He goes on display with his younger brother, George (“the man without a soul”) and the giant Cygan, an Italian metal showman who shared a magazine cover with Brigitte Bardot and posed with performers from the risqué Windmill Theatre in London.
The original tin men resembled humans on the outside, but not on the inside. They moved thanks to cables, gears, weights and pulleys. But in the 1990s, engineers began work on “anthropomimetic” robots with plastic skeletons, kite line tendons and bungee cord muscles. The movements are uncannily human, as are some of the downsides. Over time, robots with human-inspired skeletons became prone to familiar ailments, such as worn out joints and twisted spines.
It is not only their bodies that have been made more human. Leaps in computing mean modern robots can converse with people in a meaningful way, provide information, and entertain more than they ever have done. And it is here that the exhibition raises the most pressing questions. It is hard to object to RoboThespian, who recites Hamlet in Klingon, or to Harry, the small, trumpet-playing robot. But are we happy for Pepper, a robot that responds to human emotions, to look after our elderly? Or for Nao, an intentionally endearing robot, to teach children? The pasty, stunted telepresence robot, Telenoid, allows absent parents to call their children. It moves its mouth as they speak and mimics their head movements. Will the technology bring us closer together or drive us apart? Is it deceptive to build robots that look like humans before they match our intelligence? “We want to get people thinking,” Russell says. “And if we can do that, we’ve done our job.”
The curators call the exhibition “the greatest collection of humanoid robots anyone has ever put together”. But what if they revolt and take on their human masters? “I’m not too worried about that,” says Russell. “If they do rise up, their batteries will soon run down.”
The Robots exhibition opens at the Science Museum on 8 February 2017 and runs until 3 September 2017.
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