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"We'd have most of what we predicted of the conquest of space, if we hadn't ignored parasite control."
- Larry Niven
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| Robot Hands | ||
| Human-like appendages for the ends of upper limbs. |
As far as I know, the first use of the phrase "robot hands" in science fiction.
| As a man, Hugh Grimes had died nearly a thousand years before. Convicted of murder, he had been sentenced to death on January 2, 2000. But the robot of the man whose body he had destroyed had interceded for him — had even assisted in the delicate operation which had transferred his brain to the glass skull case and given him a thousand years of robot life.
Despite the intercession of Albert Bradshaw, Grimes still bated him. For at some time during the operation, the precentral cortex of his brain had been injured. And so, instead of sending the correct electrical impulses to the delicate mechanism of the robot as they! had sent them to his motor nervous system in life, they were faulty. As a result, his robot hands shook like those of a man with paralysis agitans, and one foot dragged when he walked...
...Drawing a long pair of rubber gloves over his shaking robot hands. Grimes plunged them into the solution surrounding the suspended brain, and released the clamps. |
| Technovelgy from The Iron World,
by Otis Adelbert Kline. Published by Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1937 Additional resources -
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Compare to the mechanical hand from Buck Rogers, 2430 AD (1929) by Philip Nowlan (w/D. Calkins), the robotic hand from The Door Into Summer (1956) by Robert Heinlein and the interchangeable hand from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) by Philip K. Dick.
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| Artificial Skin For Robots Is Coming Right Along |
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| Dancing Robots Taught Dance Moves |
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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...'
