Recently I can across a site that the Museum of Hoaxes (www.museumofhoaxes.com) considers a hoax, but has not actual proof (just strong suspicion). The site claims that there was a robot built in the 1880’s called Boilerplate, which was debuted at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. However, according to the MoH, none of the books in the bibliography exist according to the Library of Congress, and my own personal research revealed that at least one World’s Columbian Exposition website neglects mentioning this alleged marvel. However, some robotic enthusiast websites cite Boilerplate as an example of some first robots. So, what’s the Straight Dope?
Here’s the most extensive and original Boilerplate site:
We barly hane the technology to build a humanoid robot today - it took decades of research and lots of computing power to get a robot that could even walk on two legs, let alone do all the wonderous things Boilerplate is supposed to have done. Given the total lack of any engineering details on how it was supposed to have work, I say fiction.
Just did a quick search for “Archibald Campion” on Google. The only hits are the original site, and others referencing it. The books listed in the bibliography on that site don’t exist. I suspect a patent search for Archibald Campion would also turn up nothing.
Take a look at the http://www.bigredhair.com/ site. Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett write science fiction and draw graphic novel artwork.
It’s fiction. They wrote a very detailed site on something that never happened, and a lot of people believed it was real. It isn’t.
The shadows don’t line up right. Look at the shadow of the wheel, then at the shadow of BP’s legs. The former suggests a source of light relatively high in the sky, the latter a source relatively low and (to my eye) in a different position east-to-west, if you get my meaning.
I don’t know anything about ‘boilerplate’, but I’d point out that there used to be a popular craft involving the construction of extremely intricate mechanical movements, including some ‘robots’. Of course, they weren’t robots in the sense that they had any intelligence at all, but they had clockwork mechanisms so intricate that they could make astonishingly realistic movements.
Yep. I just looked at the boilerplate stuff - it’s obviously a fake. But some of the automatons back then were incredible in their intricacy and lifelike behaviour.
