TRANSCRIPT FROM PUBLIC LECTURE, GIVEN BY TERRANCE "TERRY" VANCE, ON THE CAMPUS OF EMPIRE STATE UNIVERSITY, ENGINEERING BUILDING LECTURE HALL C. ROUGHLY 40 PEOPLE IN ATTENDANCE, STUDENTS, FACULTY, STAFF AND NON-CAMPUS VISITORS.
DESCRIPTION THE SCREEN ON THE DIAS IS DOWN, INDICATING A POSSIBLE POWERPOINT OR VIDEO PRESENTATION. A CURTAIN COVERS A SIX FOOT AREA OF THE STAGE, THOUGH THE OUTLINE OF A TABLE COVERED WITH UNIDENTIFIABLE LARGE OBJECTS IS VAGUELY VISIBLE.
THE ADVERTISED TALK SUBJECT WAS " 1939-1940 : ROBOTICS AND AI BEGINS BY TERRY VANCE, T.A.
Transcript of recording, taken from speaker's microphone. Minimal audio from audience questions.
"OK people, looks like I may as well start. I see some faces I recognize, some I don't. After my talk, I usually do some question and answer, and make appointments for one on one talks if you're a student or a reporter.
"People are often mystified how we went from robotics in 1939 that were just crude marionettes and computers that went from glorified adding machines to expert systems and almost-artificial intelligence by the middle of World War Two. It is as if in the span of a few months, Orville and Wilber Wright had gone from being able to stay in the air for twelve seconds to a successful trip to the moon. We've all grown up hearing the modern myths trying to explain it. Depending whom you ask, you can be told it was time travelers from the future, or salvaged space ships from alien races. At least one professor here at ESU teaches a class on theories of lost civilizations of ancient humans and other races here on Earth, leaving behind advanced technology like we throw away soda cans and candy wrappers. Don't you believe it!
I have spent the past three years as a student and most of my free time reading the notebooks, diaries and blueprints left to ESU and to State University at Hegeman. The Library of Congress's collection of declassified records from the Strategic Scientific Reserve were also very helpful. I'm working on a textbook that will be out next Spring on the history of AI and Robotics. I'd like to prove once and for all that four men made all the breakthroughs on their own without aliens, time travelers or Atlantis. No one involved as a mutant either, they were homo sapiens sure enough. Some was through lucky guesses, trial and error, and a few very risky shortcuts. But mostly it was hard work, education and human levels of genius.
This is a picture of the Williams brothers, Joel and Joshua. Joel was a chemical engineer, Joshua was an electrical engineer. Both had worked for Thomas Edison in the late 1920s. Edison had taught them both to focus on finding products that consumer's didn't even realize they needed yet, and to give the world ways to live better and healthier lives.
Joshua was the one that decided that to make their mark, they should turn old myths like golems and fiction like the Tin Woodsman and find a way to turn it into a product to be sold. "Why risk human lives on dangerous jobs like working with explosives and toxic chemicals when an artificial human could do the work free of risk," he was quoted in one news article. "For that matter why risk the lives of firemen, policemen, miners or deep sea divers?" It was the classic reasoning behind mechanization, to free humanity from the worst manual labor so they would be free to do higher things. As always, the issue was how to make something that could do the work of a human cheaper than you could hire and train a human to do the same job?
Joel hit on the idea of a way to make an artificial human cheaper than a real one. "Life is a collection of cells working together for a common purpose," he told one reporter. "Using chemicals, I can duplicate collections of cells following a single purpose, and my brother's equipment can direct these cells in their work." Joel called his synthetic cells "living rubber" and the Williams brothers kept their formula for it a secret between them. Joshua devised a synthetic nervous system that responded to simple commands, though a radio remote control worn on the wrist.
The papers I have on Flexo's design aren't complete, so I can't show you how this next part worked. But that wrist devise we see Joel wearing tapped into Joel's nervous system to interface with Flexo's built in electronic brain. This simplified the programming of Flexo and reduced the demands for built in computing power. Whomever wore the wrist controller essentially controlled two bodies with one brain. As long as the human controller didn't attempt anything more demanding than a slow walk, the Flexo unit could carry out any action a human was capable of.
I have some news footage of their robot, called "Flexo, the Rubber Man" in the Williams Brothers attempts to raise funds. Flexo was used by the Williams Brothers to escape when a gang employed by a criminal scientist named Otto Murdo kidnapped them. They also used Flexo when Axis spies stole plans for a naval "torpedo repellor" they had designed and were giving to the War Department. When this didn't convince investors to help raise funds needed to mass produce Flexo units in the thousands, the Williams Brothers agreed to do work on the front lines against the Axis powers, using their prototype robot worker as a soldier. After some successes, the brothers were killed and their creation was destroyed in 1943 when their plane was shot down into the British Chanel. A brilliant idea, decades ahead of its time, wasted because they couldn't get the funding needed. An old story to anyone who knows the history of science and progress. After their deaths, some of their work was pieced together by others, working from published papers, some was handed around by industrial spies, investors and so on. But by showing what was POSSIBLE, they allowed many others down through the years to cobble together similar ideas into their own inventions. I have several chapters detailing the "family trees" of various robot designers of the past eight decades. A great many were inspired by Joel and Joshua Williams.
On to a more well-known name among the bright lights of the 20th Century in technology. He doesn't have the rabid fan base of Nikola Tesla, and he never made as big a fortune as Howard Stark or Howard Hughes. But Philo Zogolowski had certainly made his mark by 1940. Born in 1880, Zogolowski had gone into business inventing and manufacturing everything from railroad engine parts, telephone switches, navigation equipment and the first pop up toaster. In 1940, he announced that rather than retire as everyone expected, he would spend the remainder of his career using his genius for invention and his personal fortune to found what he called TEAM:ELECTRO. Headquartered in Lebanon, Kansas, the center of the country, he created an office of 12 top investigative reporters, detectives and criminologists to root out crime, corruption and situations where the authorities were overwhelmed. And as their main tool, was ELECTRO, THE WONDER OF THE AGE, it was called. The footage you're seeing now are actual unaltered film of Zoglowski's robot. Made of steel and ceramic, painted red, gold and green and it reminds me of a Roman Centurion combined with the Incredible Hulk.
Over eight feet tall and weighing three quarters of a ton, Electro was a walking talking tank. It's "face" was a TV screen which it's controller could speak through and be seen. Using electa-wave technology, the controller could actually get full sensory input and instantly direct Electro's actions. Strong enough to pull a freight train, or run at 100 miles per hour, or even leap several miles in a jump. Durable as a tank. For several years, Team : Electro fought forest fires, helped evacuate disaster victims, was used in police actions against drug rings, white slavers, Nazi spies and saboteurs. Zoglowski considered all this a test project, planning to have a Team : Electro in every state in the country after the war ended, to help save lives, keep the peace and protect America.
But then he died in 1944, heart attack. After the war, no one could agree WHO should run a national network of Team : Electro, whether it should be the FBI, or the SSR, or each individual state government. So the SSR put the plans on the shelf, the equipment in a warehouse and forgot all about the dream of robotic first responders to disasters, riots and so forth. Once again, a missed opportunity because the key person involved wasn't there to finish it all up.
But on the positive side, Zoglowski kept good notes, left plenty or prototypes behind, and people were able to take much of his work and update it as computer technology improved. As you see from this "family tree" chart here, inventors such as Tony Stark, Bolivar Trask, Victor Von Doom, Hank Pym, Reed Richards, Spencer Smith, Mendel Stromm… They all would have been at a huge disadvantage without the shoulders of Philo Zoglowski to stand upon. I have to wonder what the man could have done if he'd lived just ten or 15 more years.
Anyways, onto my personal favorite, one of my role models, although he was arguably the LEAST successful person I discuss today or in my book. He created one of the greatest achievements in robotics and artificial intelligence ever attempted by a human being, and he did it with copper wire, vacuum tubes and beakers full of crude chemicals. His creation did more to win the Second World War than any individual soldier except possibly Captain Steve Rogers himself. And yet he died almost penniless, an alcoholic in Stamford, Connecticut working as an electrical repairman, murdered by a being that remains unpunished for it. What Vincent Van Gogh was to art, Phineas Thomas Horton was to the science of artificial intelligence. And I can tell from the lack of a reaction none of you remember the poor bastard…
TO BE CONTINUED
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