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From Garco To The New Bots In Town
dollars in electronic
research plans a personal
appearance tour of the
country in behalf of the
movie,” was one comment
made in papers.
Garrett Supply certainly
did not give Chapman any
money to build the robot
other than his salary as an
engineer. It was a side-line
labor of love for this engineer
and pioneer hobby robot
builder. Garco’s most famous
photo (Figure 2) shows
actress Sally Mansfield sitting
beside him as he ‘types’ out a
press release for Gog on a
typewriter. Sally was a regular
on the early CBS-TV Sci-Fi
series, Rocky Jones, Space
Ranger as Vena Ray,
spaceship navigator. This was a popular television show in
those days. The use of a robot to advertise the movie was a
natural, as a deadly robot went out of control in the final
scenes of the movie (something we all know robots can do
on occasion). Showing gentle Garco as a Hollywood press
agent might have added a bit of a twist to the public’s
conception of robots.
FIGURE 2. Garco with Sally Mansfield in 1958.
FIGURE 3. Garco staged as ‘stacking boxes.’
‘famous for being famous’ — much like some of the
celebrities that we read about these days.
Ten-year-old Terry Chapman (Harvey’s son) was the
hero of his neighborhood since his father had a six foot
high mechanical monster out in the garage. The younger
Chapman was adept at operating the robot and delighted
neighbors and news people alike by making the robot do all
sorts of tricks and movements. One time, someone
Media Hype
Opens Up
Uses For Garco
As I stated earlier, Garco
was a talented hobbyist’s part-time project that took off with
the tremendous media
coverage. The earliest
newspaper articles of the time
stated that “Garco represents
one of the first attempts at an
all-purpose functional
humanoid robot.” In reality, at
first, it was more like “I have
the junk parts from many old
airplanes available; I have the
engineering background; I’m
going to build a robot in my
spare time. In the beginning,
Harvey Chapman enjoyed
touring with the robot as a
crowd-gathering attraction,
much like the later
promotional robots we’ve seen
for years. Garco became
FIGURE 4. Garco as an umpire
telling a player that he’s out.
FIGURE 5. Garco ‘soldering.’
SERVO 10.2010 75
