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TIME article, Nov 1934: Alpha, the robot Last week Alpha, the robot, made its first public appearance in the U. S. .... The creature had a great sullen slit of a mouth, vast protuberant eyes, shaggy curls of rolled metal. Anxious to avoid any suspicion of ventriloquism or of a hidden assistant pushing control buttons, Professor May removed the robot's breast plate, disclosing a mechanism like the interior of an ordinary radio. Publicly he explained that Alpha's repertory of answers consisted of 20 or 30 recordings on wax cylinders, as in oldtime phonographs, which were run off in the control cabinets and reproduced from the loud speaker...
"It's a remarkable piece of apparatus," said the officer to the explorer and surveyed with a certain air of admiration the apparatus which was after all quite familiar to him.
Franz Kafka's In the Penal Colony describes the last use of an elaborate torture and execution device that carves the sentence of the condemned prisoner on his skin in a script before letting him die. [wikipedia]
http://www.amazon.com/Metamorphosis-Penal-Colony-Other-Stories/dp/0684800705/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1299700662&sr=8-1
Posted by: Kevin G. | 03/09/2011 at 11:59 AM
wow.
Posted by: katerizero | 03/09/2011 at 12:18 PM