Q&A The Science Museum revives Britain’s first robot

Eric was Britain’s first robot. He amazed audiences in the 1920s before disappearing without a trace. Now, the Science Museum, led by curator Ben Russell, is recreating the metal man ahead of next year’s robotics exhibition

first robot opened an exhibition, giving a speech in place of the Duke of York, before touring the world and suddenly disappearing.

The Science Museum is celebrating Eric, as he was called, by rebuilding the metallic celebrity in time for a new exhibition on robots that opens next February.

It was never going to be easy. First, the museum needed to crowdfund £35,000 for the project (it’s already smashed through this target, raising more than £50,000) , but curator Ben Russell and his team still have only a few photos and one snippet of video from which to work.

We spoke to Russell to find out why Eric is being resurrected and how he’ll manage such a feat.

Why are you rebuilding Eric? We have an exhibition that’s opening in February 2017, which is taking a detailed look at robots. We’re asking the question: why do we keep rebuilding ourselves as machines?

Eric came up in the course of us doing our research. He’s a bit of a forgotten hero, as it were. He was the first British robot, one of a handful of the very first modern robots anywhere.

Eric was built by Captain WH Richards. He was a journalist, so he knew how the news worked, and robots were everywhere after the 1920s. Richards was retired, and his retirement project was to build a robot of his own.

Eric was around until about 1931 – his follow-up was called George, who you could say was an improved version – but he sort of disappeared off the radar. That was quite iinnttrriigguuing ing for us; no-one is quite sure what happened to him.

He just disappeared? Often, roboticists tend to think of all robots as rubbish or junk. For all of their size and complexity, they’re usually ephemeral. They tend to get cannibalised – for example, someone pinches the motors to use elsewhere. day terms, he was quite crude. He was designed to give a speech originally. The London Society of Model Engineers held a yearly exhibition. I think it was the Duke of York who was going to open the show. He was unavailable at the last moment, and they said: “We’re a mechanical exhibition. We’ll build a mechanical man to replace him.” And so, Eric was created.

He could stand up, look around, raise his arms, give a speech, and then bow and sit down again. He wasn’t a learning or a responsive robot.

What information do you have to use to rebuild him? Eric went off touring to theatres and all sorts of places. He’s basically a piece of showmanship. And for that reason, Richards and the guys who ran him treated him in the way a magician might treat his magic tricks. A lot of stuff was kept tucked away, hidden; they didn’t let on about it.

Basically, we know what he looked like externally. There are quite a few pictures of Eric from the outside. There’s one, I think, deliberately hazy artist’s impression of the inside of him. We know approximately what he could do – there’s one surviving piece of film of him. How we recreate that is really a piece of reverse engineering.

Will the reborn Eric have more capabilities than his predecessor? I think externally he’ll remain as he was. Internally, of course, we’ll be using modern technology. We’re using electric motors and he’ll run on a controller, for example. We’ve commissioned Giles Walker, who’s based in London and has done numerous robotic installations and restorations of old robots.

See pcpro.link/263eric for more.