The Incredible Westinghouse Elektro Android

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]The idea of the robot, an autonomous, even sentient machine, has been around for millennia. In ancient Greek mythology, the blacksmith god Hastas, whose legs were injured as a child, crafted a pair of mechanical women to help him walk. From the Middle Ages onwards, various master craftsmen constructed increasingly sophisticated clockwork automatons that dazzled, and bewildered audiences the world over, such as mechanical ducks that walked, ate, and defecated, and human figures that wrote, sang, and even played chess.

[00:00:28]And for more on that, please do see our previous video, The 18th century chess robot that defeated Napoleon Ben Franklin and countless others. The word robot, however, is of far more recent origin. Derived from a Slavic word meaning slave laborer. The term first appeared in Czech playwright Carol Sharek's 1920 play Rossam's Universal Robots about a race of sentient artificial beings created for servitude who rise up against the human masters.

[00:00:52]But while the English lexicon was slow to catch up to the idea of the robot technology was slower still and it would not be until the digital electronics revolution of the 1960s and 70s that truly programmable and automatic machines would become a practical reality. In the late 1930s however the average American could catch a glimpse of this technological future in the form of a moonwalking wisecracking cigarette smoking android called Electro the Moto Man. The world's first celebrity robot created by Westinghouse Corporation.

[00:01:20]Electro was prominently displayed at the Westinghouse Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair alongside another of the fair's most popular attractions, the Westinghouse time capsule. And for more on that, please do check out our previous video, The Curious Case of the Crypto Civilization. Electro was the product of two decades of research by Westinghouse into automated electrical switching systems. In the early 1920s, a client contacted Westinghouse to request a means of controlling electrical substations remotely, saving their operators the trouble of traveling to the substations themselves to make minor adjustments. In response, Westinghouse engineer Roy J. Wensley invented the Teleox, a device that could remotely control electrical switching equipment via coded pulses sent over ordinary telephone lines. This technology, which would form the basis for the dual tone multi-frequency switching systems used in telephone networks for the next half century, allowed operators to phone into a substation and issue commands remotely using a set of pitch pipes or tuning forks. In order to promote the teleox in 1928, Wley built a portable demonstration model and took it on the road. Ever the showman, Wensley decided to give the device a crude body made out of painted wallboard, creating the character of Herbert Telivox. Wley to toured Herbert around the country, modifying him to perform simple tricks like unveiling a portrait of George Washington in honor of the first president's birthday. The gimmick was a hit, and over the following decade, engineers like JM Barnett, Jack Weekes, and Harold Gorsuch at Westinghouse's headquarters in Mansfield, Ohio, would follow in Wesley's footsteps and create a whole family of increasingly sophisticated humanoid robots, including Mr. Telux, Katrina Vontelox, and Rastus the Mechanical Negro. The latter of which was used for some reason to reenact a bizarre electronic version of William Tel shooting an apple off his son's head. But Westinghouse's ultimate robotic creation was Electro, who made his debut in 1939. Standing 2 m tall, weighing 118 lbs, and clad in shiny bronze painted aluminum, Electro could only perform 26 realistic human actions.

[00:03:23]But astonishingly for the 1930s, he could respond to voice commands. In response to simple instructions spoken into a microphone by his handler, Electro could walk, move his head and arms, count on his fingers, recognize different colors, and befitting his era, smoke a cigarette. This latter ability resulted in Westinghouse staff having to clean the tar out of Electro's mechanism after every performance, allegedly causing one engineer to quit smoking. To the astonishment of many visitors, Electro could also talk, starting every show by announcing, "Ladies and gentlemen, I'll be very glad to tell my story. I am a smart fellow as I have a fine brain of 48 electrical relays. He also used his halting monotone voice to crack corny jokes, calling his handler tootss and responding to commands with a bewildered who me. One of his favorite activities was challenging spectators to balloon inflating contests, a challenge which given he had an air compressor instead of lungs, electro seldom lost.

[00:04:15]Visitors to the 1939 World's Fair had never seen anything like it. And for many, the dazzling demonstration seemed like something of a magic trick. And in a certain sense, it was. For while Electro was promoted on his ability to follow voice commands, 1930s electronics were not yet sophisticated enough to permit true voice recognition. Instead, Electro was controlled by a series of coded pulses, cleverly hidden within the handler's command phrases. The robot responding not to the words themselves, but to the rhythm with which they were spoken. Each phrase was broken up into a sequence of three, one, and two syllables, with each sequence starting or ending a particular action. For example, the phrase, "Will you come down front, please?" would start Electro walking forward, while, "You have come far enough," would stop him. And the trickery didn't stop there. Each of Electro's 26 different actions were hardwired in linear sequence with his handler reading off a fixed scripts.

[00:05:09]This meant they couldn't be triggered in any other order. Electro's voice, composed of 700 words, was also recorded in sequence on eight 78 RPM records hidden in his chest. Even his ability to walk was an illusion. In reality, Electro moved on powered rubber rollers hidden inside his feet. His knees simply bent to give him the impression of walking. So, in effect, Electro moonwalked everywhere. Despite this technical slight of hands, Electro was a smash hit and performed daily to packed crowds throughout both seasons of the fair. During the 1940 season, the Electro was given a companion, a mechanical dog named Sparkco, who could walk forward and backward, sit, lie down, wag its tail, and bark. With the closing of the fair and the outbreak of World War II, Electro wound up in the basement of Westinghouse engineer Jack Weekes, who saved the robot from being melted down for scrap. It's here that he became the unlikely playmate of Weeks's son, also named Jack, as the younger Weeks recalled in a 2012 interview. I opened one box and there was head of a robot there. So, we started prying with my dad as to what was in the other boxes. He showed us and we managed to put the head on the torso and played with it as children, wheeling it around in games of cowboys and cops and robbers. After the war, however, Electro was dusted off and taken on tour to promote Westinghouse products, making appearances in department stores across the United States. Having previously appeared on film in Westinghouse's promotional feature, The Middleton Family, at the New York World's Fair, Electro made his television debut in 1951 on an episode of the game show You Asked for It. In 1958, Electro wound up as an exhibit at the Pacific Ocean Park near Los Angeles, where he was spotted by a Hollywood talent agent and cast as Samo in the 1960 B-grade comedy Sex Kittens Go to College opposite Mammy Von Doran. Unfortunately, this would be the last high-profile appearance for the world's first celebrity robot for shortly thereafter, Electro was crated up and returned to Mansfield. There he disappeared and was presumed lost until 2004 when Jack Weekes's brother bought a house and discovered Electro's head in a box in the basement. The rest of him turned up in a nearby barn. Electro was subsequently restored and is now on permanent display at the Mansfield Memorial Museum alongside a replica of Herbert Telox, his crude warboard ancestor. Though Electro's limited repertoire of 26 actions and 700 words may seem quaint and somewhat laughable next to the cuttingedge power of modern robotics, the wisecracking smoking android of yester year did much to shape the depiction of robots in popular culture and to inspire a sense of wonder and possibility that made much of our modern high-tech world possible. Without Electro, Maria from the 1927 film Metropolis and other pioneering pop culture robots, it's possible we would never had a C3PO, Wall-E, or even our beloved Siri and Roomba. So, I really hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please do hit that thumbs up button below. Don't forget to subscribe, and thank you for watching.