In Kevin Drum’s latest feature, he imagines a bleak future where robots begin taking all of our jobs. Though he predicts this will happen about three decades from now, the concept obviously isn’t new.

Do you know the name [George Devol]? Probably not. In 1961 he received a patent for “Programmed Article Transfer.” We’d call his invention the first robot arm, and its name was the Unimate. Unlike ...

Years before personal computers, at the end of the 1950s, robots were already working in factories–or at least one was. The Unimate 1900 series was the first mass-produced robotic arm for use in ...

The president of Unimate and one of the first industrial robots appear on the Tonight Show, in which they demonstrate how to play golf, pour a beer, and get sassy with the band. Johnny Carson marvels ...

George C. Devol, a former Greenwich resident whose groundbreaking work in robotics paved the way for the computerized arms now used in factories around the world, has died. He was 99. George C. Devol ...

The first digital and programmable robot was called Unimate and was sold for a $35,000 loss to General Motors the same year its patent was approved. The Unimate was filed for patenting by George Devol ...

It wouldn’t be right if GeekTech didn’t do something for National Robotics Week, and if there is one thing this blog loves, it’s robots. Robots are all around us, from the coffee machine in the ...

Joseph Engelberger, who has died aged 90, was an American entrepreneur who co-founded the world’s first robotics company with fellow engineer George Devol in 1956; five years later their industrial ...