While in London for the Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains, I spotted a sign for a Robots exhibition in the nearby Science Museum. I knew nothing about the exhibition but, to paraphrase the line from Jerry Maguire, they had me at “Robots”.
Admission into the Science Museum in London is free and indeed, there’s loads to see for the price of zero pence. Some exhibitions have an entry fee and this one was one of those. Still, it was about robots, the poster was pretty cool and my head was well turned.
As the exhibition poster says, Robots is the 500-year quest to make machines human. The first part of the exhibition had quite a few historical automatons, including a praying 16th-century monk and a draftsman from the beginning of the 19th century. There were also artificial limbs, tiny automatons which resembled insects, and even one that was part of a drinking game. I later learned that another historical automaton I’d love to have seen – the Silver Swan – had been in the exhibition until early April. Once it went back “oop north”, it was replaced by the little draftsman/writer created around 1800. When it was unearthed in 1928, nobody knew for sure who had created it and where it had been. That is, until they got the automaton working again and it started to write some pre-programmed poetry. Right at the end of its last poem, it scribbled ‘Ecrit par L’Automate de Maillardet’ (written by Maillardet’s automaton)
The next part of the exhibition brought us on to more recent times. It was hard not to miss the replica of “Maria”, the iconic robot from Fritz Lang’s 1927 film “Metropolis”. The original costume (which had been worn by an actress) had long since disappeared. It was also nice to get up close and personal with a T-800 from Terminator Salvation and not die horribly. There were some interesting stories attached to other robots on display in this section. Perhaps the most endearing was George the Robot, created by a young RAF officer from discarded aeroplane parts. Another British robot was beside George, this one called Eric. The original Eric the robot was created in 1928 for the Exhibition of the Society of Model Engineers, after the Duke of York cancelled his agreement to open the show. The story goes that Eric rose to his feet, bowed and gave a short speech. The robot was brought to the USA the year afterwards for a tour and vanished at some stage. The Eric on display here was a recreation of the original, funded by a Kickstarter campaign. Standing beside this pair was the Italian built Cygan. An 8 ft tall robot built in 1957 and which sold at auction for £17,500 in 2013.
Onwards then to even more robots. It soon became clear that there have been people working in robotics for a long time, for all sorts of reasons. Some for very serious purposes such as surgery and prosthetics. Others so they knock out a few tunes on a trumpet. One interesting robot on display was an “open source” model which people can contribute to. While many of the robots were turned off and not doing anything (probably not practical to have them all operating at the time time, lest a robot apocalypse happened), seeing some in action was fascinating. The one I was particular taken with was Pepper the French robot who shakes people’s hands. Honda’s Asimo was there too, though on this occasion it wasn’t playing football, conducting an orchestra or dancing. Just think – if it had, they could’ve sold lots in the gift shop 😉 Then there was the robot which was designed to look like a real Japanese woman, a blobby one that looks like an escapee from a David Lynch film, one that acts and more than a few which track your eyes…
Anyway, thumbs up from me for this one. It was great to see robots and automatons of all ages and to marvel at how these machines have evolved. I even brought home a cute little wooden robot of my own, which is standing on my desk as I type. I might just stop short of welcoming our robot overlords though…
Update: The exhibition is now immortalised on Google Streetview if you’re interested
To have a look at some of the photos I took, click on one of the thumbnails in the gallery below.
Bogwarrior.com 