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"By the time I can take people out to where Hubble is looking, they won't be human anymore, by a long way."
- Larry Niven
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| Automated Restaurant | ||
| Food is prepared and served entirely automatically. |
In this classic, one of the most basic human needs is attended to by machinery.
| Kantos Kan led me to one of these gorgeous eating places where we were served entirely by mechanical apparatus. No hand touched the food from the time it entered the building in its raw state until it emerged hot and delicious upon the tables before the guests, in response to the touching of tiny buttons to indicate their desires. |
| Technovelgy from A Princess of Mars,
by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Published by All-Story in 1912 Additional resources -
|
It's likely that this idea was inspired by the first automats, which were 'restaurants' that featured food sold from what we now call vending machines. The first automat in the U.S. was opened in 1902 in Philadelphia, inspired by the world's first, which opened in Berlin, Germany.
These original automats did have a human employee, whose function was to provide nickels to customers to feed the machines. When the appropriate number of nickels was fed into the slot, and the meal chosen, the customer could slide the door open to receive his food.
Compare to the home food preparation machine from Unto Us A Child Is Born, by David H. Keller (1933).
Thanks to an anonymous reader for suggesting this item.
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More Ideas
and Technology from A Princess of Mars
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Tech news articles related to A Princess of Mars
Tech news articles related to works by Edgar Rice Burroughs
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| Robochef Robotic Food Prep |
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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
