Robots Alchemy Androids, Cyborgs,
and the Magic of Artificial Life
by Texe Marrs
Chapter 5
Social Relationships and Robots to Come
The Robot Revolution will result in astonishing changes. Even our social relations will change
dramatically. By the year 2030, companion and sex robots will be available. They’ll look and feel like
your fantasy guy or gal, talk as much or as little as you like about the subjects you are most interested in.
And when you get ready to go to bed, well, they’ll be there for you, too.
“You love your robot more than you love me?”
“No, I don’t!”
“Yes, you do.”
“Well, uhh. Yes, I do.”
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Jong-Hwan’s software for the robot is modeled on human DNA, though it has only a single strand of
genetic code.
Discussions and Lawsuits
When that momentous day comes, and the robotic or android lover arrives, perhaps such social dating
groups as match.com, mingle.com and others will change. There might be one section for humans, another
for robots.
All kinds of discussions and lawsuits about robot civil and constitutional rights will be entertained. Is a
robot fully “human” or a different species altogether? When does a cyborg become a robot? Is it a matter
of how many artificial parts the human has implanted? And what of the human that has his entire brain
essence downloaded into a waiting robot body. Is the end result a human or a robot?
These things have never been—or rarely been—discussed and debated, although in a few movies and
stage productions (R.U.R.; Metropolis; Descendance), the plot involves humans or robots who rebel
against their circumstances.
The question of spirituality also arises, but I will save that important topic for another book.
The Economics of Robots: Chinese
Robots Increase 151% in Four Years
Robots are already changing the work world, and soon they will be making a dramatic impact on our
everyday world, too—the world of play, study, recreation, and rest. Activistpost.com reports that the
robotics industry is growing magnificently. In China alone, the industrial robotics market has grown a
whopping 151% in just the four-year period 2008-2012. In a few more years, China may be the world’s
#1 end user of robots.
This is amazing considering the fact that China has over one billion people, many either unemployed or
unproductively employed. Hundreds of millions will sit and vegetate while robots continue to be
introduced and perform more and more of the workload.
This is beginning to cause a significant shift in world markets as Western industrialized nations begin to
“reshore,” starting up new robotized plants in Europe and North America. No longer do the high population locales of Asia and South America have an advantage.
It’s Hitting the U.S.A. and Other Developed Nations
In the U.S.A., manufacturing jobs now make up only about 17% of the workforce versus 51% in the 50s.
According to the McKinsey Global Institute, America lost 5.8 million jobs between 2000 and 2010.
Owners were off-shoring their manufacturing. For example, Foxconn makes iPhones and iPods in China,
and Hershey bars are made in Mexico. But with economical and dependable intelligent robots,
manufacturing can be expected to return. This time around, the jobs will not go to the best human, but to
the best robot.
In 2013, two Associated Press reporters, Bernard Condon and Paul Wiseman, did a three-part series
(Impact—Recession, Tech Kill Jobs) explaining why the future for human workers is grim. Their
conclusions:
#Millions of jobs have been lost in developed countries the world over.
#Most of the jobs will never return; millions more will vanish as well.
#These jobs are being lost everywhere, in China and the West.
#Jobs are vanishing not only in manufacturing, but increasingly, in the service industries.
#They’re being obliterated by technology
The culprit, say Condon and Wiseman, is machines that generate and analyze vast amounts of data, by
devices such as smartphones and computer tablets, and by smarter, nimbler robots.
Japanese Robots
In Japan, robots are already becoming ubiquitous. Religion has a role to play. The Shinto religionist sees
little boundaries between the living and the inanimate. Statues are worshipped. Thus, humanoid robots are
more easily accepted, and as a result, Japanese scientists are steady at work on human-looking robots. It
is not uncommon to find robots of all kinds in cinema and in cartoons while actual woman and man-size
replica robots are becoming fashionable.
First came the toys in Japan, with every kid on the block clamoring for a toy robot. Now comes the
household revolution as the Japanese applaud the work of robotic craftsmen and researchers. With Japan
having the world’s highest abortion rate and the increasing aged workforce, the Robot Revolution is now
in earnest.
Over 400,000 robots dot the Japanese landscape, and at every science and technology show, new
models are introduced. Japan currently has 40% of the planet’s industrial robots, and by the year 2025,
the government insists, the number of robots will expand to one million. Most believe this number is
severely underestimated, and when the Robot Revolution really takes off, there will be over a million
robots created and put to work each year! A single industrial robot can take the place of 10 humans.
“Robots are the cornerstone of Japan’s industrial competitiveness,” asserts Shunichi Uchiyama, the
Trade Chief of manufacturing energy policy, said at a recent trade show. “We expect robotics in more
sectors to go forward.”
“The cost of machinery is going down, while labor costs are rising,” notes Eimei Onaga, CEO of
Innovate, a Japanese robotics firm that distributes in the U.S.A. and Europe. “Soon, robots could even
replace workers at small firms, greatly boosting productivity.”
The Personal Robot Market
By 2035 industrial robots will be about 30% of the current Japanese workplace, a staggering number. But
until robots are more intelligent—are conscious and possess a personality and can think and converse—the personal robot market will be slack. However, once the technological bridge is crossed, the sky is the
limit in Japan, where thousands of men await the companion robot, and many, as a boy or girl, had the
robot dog, Albo, as a pet.
Today, the Japanese continue to produce marketable toy robots. Sony has its low-cost robots like
Tomy’s $300 i-Sobot hobby model. The Tomy i-Sobot has 17 motors, can recognize and act on spoken
words, and is remote-controlled.
At Osaka University, researchers continue to believe in the life-size personal robot. Minoru Asada,
robotics engineer, demonstrates the Child Robot with biometric body. This is a robot built not of steel but
of flexible and soft materials. This robot has the motions of a child and can react, wiggling, making facial
expressions, and producing sounds.
That’s still a long way from adult robots that can interact smoothly and efficiently with real people.
This is the goal of Hiroshi Ishiguro, robotics guru at Osaka University. He’s even created a robot that
looks like himself, complete with dark, wiry hair, a tan and eyeglasses.
“What people want is not a creepy machine or a computer, they want a real-life robot person,” says
Ishiguro. “We want to interact with robots in a natural way so we try to make robots that look like us.”
“One day,” Ishiguro assures listeners, “they will live among us. Then you’d have to ask me, are you a
robot? Or a human?”
Science Fiction Come True
If we are really only 10, 15, or 20 years from developing such a robot, the dreams of many science fiction
writers will swiftly and surely come true. For example, in a 1972 talk (that’s almost 45 years ago!)
called, “The Android and The Human,” sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick spoke of the future. Computers and
robotics, said Dick, are receiving animism and magic after hundreds of years of repression.
“Machines are becoming more human,” Dick remarked. “Our environment, and I mean our man-made
world of machines, is becoming alive in ways specifically and analogous to ourselves.”
Dick, one of the world’s top visionaries and author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (prelude
to Blade Runner), says that at first he feared this occurring—the robot coming alive. But finally, he has
accepted it. “The (robotic) constructs are actually human already,” he noted.
“Someday,” said Dick, “a human might shoot a robot and see it bleed, and when the robot shot back, the
human would gush smoke” from the wound.
“It would be a great moment of truth for them,” said Dick.
Chapter 6:
Robots and the Creation of Life
The notion of a synthetic man, an artificial life form, or an intelligent machine has occupied the fertile
imagination of philosophers, writers, and scientists throughout human history. Myth has been piled atop
myth and concept atop fantasy, all building on the theme of man exercising a measure of divine power by
infusing life into inanimate objects or inorganic materials.
The invention of robots, both in fact and in fiction, seems to be the result of a psychological, even a
behavioral instinct, in homo sapiens to be a creator. There’s been an accompanying utilitarian motive,
too, of course: the construction of robotic machines to accomplish heavy industrial work and to be the
personal servants of humankind.
For example, in classical Greece, in the 4th century B.C., Aristotle observed: “If every instrument
could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others… if the shuttle could weave
and the pick touch the lyre without a human hand to guide them, chief workmen would not need servants
nor masters slaves.”
Humans have also sought to create artificial life forms to function as protectors and companions. It’s
also safe to speculate that for some humans the yearning to manufacture artificial beings involves a quest
to control and master destiny, to emulate God or even to demonstrate independence of a supreme being.
The Original Creation of Life
It generally has been assumed by almost all cultures that the manufacture of life and the creation of man is
the sole prerogative of one or more divinities. The ancient Egyptians and Greeks believed that the Roman
and animal forms were fashioned by the gods.
Plato, for example, related a tale of gods creating mortals out of a mixture of earth and fire, then
directing Prometheus and his brother, Epimetheus, to endow them with lifelike qualities, However,
Epimetheus saw fit to distribute the best qualities (strength, speed, protective hides, and the like) to the
animals: thus Prometheus, who favored humans, was forced to steal fire from the gods and bestow that gift
upon the human race.
The Greek divinity Hephaestus, god of the mechanical arts, was said to have formed golden
maidservants, marvelously gifted creatures of wisdom who could speak and walk. Mythology has it that
Hephaestus, called Vulcan by the Romans, made Talus, a giant creature of brass who guarded the Isle of
Crete by hugging intruders against his heated body until they were dead. Daedalus, a descendant of
Hephaestus, is said to have created statues that moved—a bronze warrior and a wooden figure of the
goddess Aphrodite whose mobility derived from the use of quicksilver in its constitution.
Several centuries later, the Roman writer Ovid proposed that the god Jupiter “made man of his own
divine substance.” In Asia, similar notions of creation were common. The early Egyptians believed that
the god Neph used his potter’s wheel to shape the first human being out of the sweat of his own body.
In Assyro-Babylonian mythology, according to the Epic of the Creation, the great god Marduk molded
the first mortal using the blood and life essence of a defeated god.
The biblical account of Adam and Eve in Genesis is the foundation of the Judaic and Christian belief in
God’s creation of human life. God is said to have created man “of the dust of the ground” and to have
“breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” Also: “To form a companion for His handiwork, God took a
rib from the man and fashioned from it the first woman.”
Man is Creator
That man could emulate God and also be a creator of human life was in ages past considered the height of
vanity and pride: an act of hubris. Any attempt to construct a synthetic human was thought to be a sacrilege
and strictly forbidden by many cultures. It was, however, generally acceptable for mechanical
contrivances or life forms to be created that honored a god or saint, or that imitated animals.
In the unaccredited and unrecognized Lost Books of the Bible, the pseudepigrapha, is a fascinating
account of Jesus as a boy. Recorded in “Thomas’ Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus Christ,” the account
depicts a youthful Jesus forming twelve sparrows out of soft clay he finds on the bank of a stream.
However, as it was the Sabbath day, Joseph asked him why he had profaned the Sabbath by forming the
birds of clay.
Then Jesus, clapping together the palms of his hands, called to the sparrows and said to them: Go, fly
away; and while ye live remember me.
So the sparrows fled away, making a noise.
Giovanni Battista Bracelli's robot drawings 1624
Works of the Devil
While it may have been acceptable in the early days of Christianity for someone to speculate that Jesus, as
a youth, could create life, it was quite another thing to attribute to a mortal man this miraculous ability.
Many years after the life of Jesus, Albertus Magnus (1204-72) is reputed to have made for himself a lifesize automaton servant. Meeting the automaton on the street, an amazed and angry Thomas Aquinas is said
to have ordered it destroyed, believing it to be the work of the devil.
Later, about 1640, the great philosopher-scientist René Descartes (“I think; therefore I am.”)
manufactured a remarkable automaton that he lovingly referred to as “Ma fille Francine.” Unfortunately,
Descartes took Francine, the automaton, on a sea voyage during which the captain of the ship became so
terrified and filled with superstitious dread that he grabbed the moving automaton and heaved it
overboard.
One artist who defied popular sentiment against lifelike automatons and figures was the Italian
Giovanni Battisti Bracelli. In 1624, he drew etchings that are remarkable in their resemblance to today’s
androids. Bracelli’s drawings show figures with heads, eyes, and other human features. Bracelli’s
robotlike figures were functional: one carried a bird on its hand, another sharpened an item on a built-on
whetstone, and a third was able to ring its own bell with a draw cord.
Mechanical humanoid figures or artificial humans who mete out justice, or who perform acts of charity
or display goodness have always been acceptable in mythology and literature. In the Thousand and One
Nights saga, Sinbad the sailor has several adventures in which robots and automatons play a fascinating
part. In one story, a robot decapitates two grave robbers.
The Golem
One of the most enduring legends about robots is that of the golem. The word golem, meaning “formless
mass,” is of Hebrew origin. The golem legend has taken many forms since its earliest telling some 1,800
years ago. The stories usually depict the golem as a huge and powerful, mute synthetic man who arrives
during a critical period to protect Jews from persecution. For example, in one popular tale, the wise
Rabbi Loew of Prague seeks God’s intervention when the Jewish community is threatened. God’s
assistance is made manifest by life being breathed into a clay giant, the golem.
Whereas the golem legend generally represents the golem as a protector and a divine agent, a few
accounts picture the creature as a menace and as a hulking monster. One is about Rabbi Elijah ben Judah
(1514-83) who, it is said, molded a golem out of clay then pasted on its head the kabbalistic words of a
sacred formula. When the golem turned out to be evil and bent on destruction, the good rabbi tore the
formula off its forehead. The golem robot promptly crumbled into a heap of dust.
Other golem stories have the creature as a household servant and home companion for Jewish children.
These stories are popularized by those who warned that Jews were committing sacrilege by creating life.
Said one German, Johann Jakob Schuder, in his 1718 tract, Jewish Wonders: “Polish Jews often make the
golem, which they employ in their homes…for all sorts of housework.”
Early in the twentieth century the legend of the golem acquired newfound popularity and several more
stories appeared, along with the newly published editions of classic tales. In addition, films and dramatic
plays about the golem were premier attractions in Europe and the United States.
The Frankenstein Monster
Throughout history, the lore and legend of robots and artificial life has focused on two, very different
concepts. On the one hand, the robot is often depicted as a frightening and destructive monster who
possesses little or no conscience and has no sympathy for suffering humans. The opposite end of the
imaginative spectrum is the depiction of the robot as lovable and altruistic and as a boon to humanity—a
thoughtful being or machine who will benefit civilization. The Frankenstein legend is interesting because
it touches both ends of the spectrum, presenting the image of an experiment for good that, tragically, turns
into a catastrophe.
The Frankenstein tale began in 1814 when writer Mary Shelley visited a museum in Switzerland where
several amazing automatons by the Jacquet Droz brothers were on display. She came away with the
embryo of a spectacular idea. A few years later, in 1818, Shelley’s now classic novel, Frankenstein, or
The Modern Prometheus, was published.
The fictional Frankenstein monster was not a true robot in that his body was constructed not of steel or
iron but of actual biological body parts stolen from the deceased. Nevertheless, the story of the fabled
monster is instructive for robotics because it chronicles the wide variety of emotions that may be
engendered in those involved in the life creation process.
In her book, Shelley masterfully provides insight into the twin motives of the monster’s creator, the
single-mindedly driven Dr. Victor Frankenstein. On one hand, the doctor was possessed by a searing
desire to possess a divine attribute. Said Dr. Frankenstein: “A new species would bless me as its creator
and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.”
That arrogance was joined by a second aspiration to restore life to loved ones and others who had
passed away. The doctor reasoned, “I thought that if I could bestow animation upon a lifeless matter, I
might, in process of time, renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.”
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The experiment went awry, though, and posterity was stuck with the monster who emerged from Dr.
Frankenstein’s lab. The moral, of course, is that it is extremely dangerous for man to play God. At the
same time, because the Frankenstein monster was given life by a scientific and technological process—fictional though it was—and by a person trained in surgical procedure, the prevailing sentiment that
science may bear evil fruit was reinforced.
The Great Robot Hoax
Whereas Frankenstein’s monster was a fictional character, the Turk, an automaton chess player created by
Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen was purported to be real.
The Turk sat behind a chess table, calmly puffing on a long pipe. His chess mastery was a marvel to all
who observed him competing against human opponents. What they didn’t know was that the table was
configured to disguise the existence of a world-class human chess player hiding inside.
When von Kempelen died in 1805, a rather unscrupulous Austrian promoter named Johann Mälzel
inherited the Turk automaton; thus began its fame and its eventual notoriety. Mälzel took the device on a
celebrated tour of Europe and America. During the tour, the Turk defeated almost every challenger whom he faced. As the virtually unbroken chain of victories grew, excited audiences on both continents
marveled at its virtuosity. Experts in mechanical engineering and machinery and even heads of state
praised the automaton as authentic. Even the skeptics who inspected its performance were unable to
unmask the Turk chess player as fraud.
The downfall of the Turk can be attributed at least in part to none other than Edgar Allan Poe, the great
writer of horror and mystery stories. In 1834, Poe attended a demonstration of the automaton’s prowess.
Intrigued and bedeviled, Poe decided to investigate the machine. In April 1836, he published a lengthy
essay carefully elaborating how he thought the automaton worked.
The following year, 1837, a French magazine ran an exposé of the automaton, revealing exactly how the
mechanism worked, including the fact that the chess table concealed a very real man. The Turk automaton,
declared the convincing article, was a fake and a hoax.
Shortly thereafter, faced with the proof of his chicanery, Johann Mälzel retired the Turk chess player. It
was subsequently placed in a museum but later was destroyed by fire.
Robots and the Machine Age
The arrival of the Industrial Revolution, or the Machine Age as it is sometimes called, caused people to
wonder if a mechanical device could be shaped into human form. Some also wondered if a machine that
does the work of human beings might somehow, by some miracle of metaphysical mechanics, assume
human psychological dimensions and spontaneously exercise independent thought, motives, and action.
The nineteenth century saw the advent of the Industrial Revolution as a mixed blessing. The advantages
were manifest, but fears were aroused that machines would produce mass unemployment. In one dramatic
story published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1844, an “aerio-nautical man” reported on his
“Recollection of Six Days Journey in the Moon.” The author reported that while visiting the advanced
civilization of the Moon’s Isle of Engines, he found:
Everything there is done by machinery; and the men themselves, if not machines, are as much their
slaves as the genie of Aladdin’s Lamp. These machines have in great measure taken the place of men,
and snatched the bread from their mouths, because they work so much cheaper and faster.
Robots to Replace Humans
Samuel Butler’s imaginative and thought-provoking novel, Erewhon (1872), proposed that contemporary
machines were prototypes of future mechanical life. Earlier, in 1863, Butler had written a most
remarkable essay, “Darwin Among the Machines,” in which he suggested that the invention of machinery
was an important step in an evolutionary process that would eventually result in machines becoming
man’s successor on earth.
It appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty
and delicacy of their physical organization; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by
all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what
intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.
Man will have become to the machine what the horse and dog are to man.
Samuel Butler’s prophetic depiction of a future world in which man would become the slave of
machines did not at all alter the drive and determination of nineteenth-century industrialists. Invention
after invention resulted in the adoption of machines to run mills, till fields, weave cloth, make shoes, and
perform dozens of other tasks.
The Steam Men
The development of the steam engine was particularly welcomed by industrialists who believed it would
revolutionize every facet of the economy. A few visionaries even conceived of steam-operated robots. In
1865, a dime store novel by Edward S. Ellis, The Steam Man of the Prairie, became a bestseller. The
book told of a ten-foot-tall iron man so strong and fast he could pull a heavily laden wagon at great
speeds. All it took to make the steam man of the prairie happy and contented was wood in his furnace and
water in his boiler.
The “Steam Man of the Prairie” and his many imitators were not at all threatening or scary creatures.
Absent from these stories was the notion that these robots could malfunction and become malevolent or
menacing. Instead, the robot is seen as a worker and a helpmate, happily subservient to its human creator.
However, the cautionary warnings of Butler and the red flag of horror hoisted by Shelley in her
Frankenstein tale continued to give pause to those who, perhaps, would otherwise have enthusiastically
embraced the idea of mechanical life. During the mid to late nineteenth century and on into the early
twentieth century, society alternated between the extremes of optimistically accepting the possibility of
living machines and being gripped by fear at the dread prospect of mechanical life that may inadvertently
run amok.
The Bell Tower
Herman Melville’s highly regarded short story “The Bell Tower” (1855) reflects these ambivalent
feelings toward mechanical life. Strikingly reminiscent of a “Twilight Zone” episode, the “Bell Tower”
relates the strange case of a great “mechanician,” an engineer and mechanical genius named Bannadonna.
Bannadonna creates a lifelike automaton to strike a great bell in a majestic tower precisely at
prescribed times. But on the day the automaton is to commence its operation, startled police find
mechanician Bannadonna’s body, badly mutilated and lifeless, at the foot of the iron automaton. Evidently,
Bannadonna had carelessly obstructed the path of the mechanical figure which, mistaking him for the bell,
had struck the hapless mechanician with its solid hammer.
Author Melville, however, suggests that this was no mere accident, that tragedy befell the ambitious
Bannadonna because of his hubris in desiring to become a creator. Concludes Melville, “So the blind
slave obeyed its blinder lord, but in obedience, slew him…And so pride went before the fall.”
Will Robots Take Over the World?
Melville’s automaton endangered only its creator, but Czechoslovakian playwright Karel Capek, in his
dramatic play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), presented robots as a potential menace to the entire
human species. Capek, as related earlier, is credited with the coining of the term robot. In his frightening
and apocalyptic R.U.R., millions of robot androids are built to serve as slaves for humans. However, the
intelligent robots soon rebel and turn against their controllers with a vengeance. Quickly, they move to rid
the world of biological men and women.
Soon only one man remains, a clerk named Alquist. However, it is to sole survivor Alquist that the
robots must turn for salvation, for the robots do not know how to begat children nor are they aware of the
secrets of their manufacture. So they beseech Alquist, “Tell us the secret of life…Teach us to multiply or
we perish.”
Responds Alquist, “I am the last human being, robots, and I do not know what the others knew…I
cannot create life.”
All hope is not lost, though. At the robots’ insistence, Alquist prepares to dissect two of their kind—a
male and a female—to discover how they are manufactured. But Primus, the male robot, resists,
exclaiming, “Man, you shall kill neither of us…We—we—belong to each other.”
Alquist suddenly realizes that intelligent life will not perish from the earth. Instead, these two emotion-
filled robots will doubtless go on to repopulate the earth. “Go. Adam… Eve,” he solemnly motions.
Capek’s play met mixed critical reviews; nevertheless it had a profound impact on the perception
people had of robots. Capek himself called his production, “A fantastic melodrama,” but gave rise to
speculation that it might be unwitting prophecy.
Man IS A Robot
Rodney Brooks, who runs the AI Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has a new and
intriguing nonfiction book out, entitled Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us. Brooks’ thesis
is that, essentially, humans are—right now, at this moment—robots. They are robots made up of molecular
(biological) machines. The sooner we humans understand this, the better.
Of course, I vaguely do understand this. However, surely man is more than simply a collection of
robotic, molecular components. There is, after all, the faculty of thinking, which most people do. Men
and women generally have spiritual aspirations, too, which robots omit. However, Brooks does make a
good case when he recommends we consider this similarity when attempting to construct robotic
machines.
“Good” Robots
The bleak view that robots and artificial life forms constitute a threat to humanity has never been
universal. One notable writer who preferred to picture robots as a kind, caring breed was L. Frank Baum(1856-1919). Baum is best known for his classic book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), which
includes in its cast of unforgettable characters the youthful Dorothy, Scarecrow, the the Tin Man (also
called the Tin Woodsman), and the Cowardly Lion. However, Baum also wrote a number of other
delightful books, including The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) and the entertaining Ozma of Oz (1907).
These books were recently reprinted by Dover Publications.
Baum’s genius was in creating unlikely characters who magically sprang to life or showed up at just the
right time. Among Baum’s remarkable creations was the Saw Horse, an animated horse of wood: Jack
Pumpkinhead, a stilt like fellow constructed of wood planks and iron nails with a pumpkin on top, and Tik
Tok, a rotund, moustached, metal-skinned robot.
The episodes in Ozma of Oz that feature Dorothy, a talking chicken named Billina, and Tik-Tok are
especially splendid and imaginative. Here is how Tik-Tok is described:
He was only about as tall as Dorothy herself, and his body was round as a ball and made out of
burnished copper. Also his head and limbs were copper, and these were jointed or hinged to his
body in a peculiar way, with metal caps over the joints, like the armor worn by knights of old.
In the story, when Dorothy first encounters Tik-Tok, he is immobile and quiet and she believes him to
not be alive. So, Dorothy took the key to Tik Tok off a peg and wound up the robot’s clockwork
mechanism, whereupon the copper man suddenly spoke, “Good morning, little girl…thank you for
rescuing me.”
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next 103s
The Robot Invasion
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