Waldemar Kaempffert? G. K. Chesterton? Apocryphal?
Question for Quote Investigator: The ongoing progress in robotics reminds me of skeptical remarks such as the following:
(1) There will never be a robot, a tireless mechanism performing all the functions of a man.
(2) A robot would be brainless because even an ingenious technologist cannot make a collection of wheels, shafts, magnets, and wires think.
(3) There will never be a robot schoolmaster or governess.
Apparently, comments like these were made in the 1920s or 1930s. The first two statements have been attributed to U.S. science journalist Waldemar Kaempffert. The third statement has been attributed to prominent English literary figure G. K. Chesterton. I am not sure of the precise phrasing for any of these statements. Would you please explore this topic?
Reply from Quote Investigator: Waldemar Kaempffert was an acclaimed science journalist and museum director. He wrote for “Scientific American” and became the editor of “Popular Science Monthly”. In October 1927 Kaempffert published an article in “The New York Times” in which he speculated about the capabilities and limitations of future robots:1
There will never be a Robot—a brainless, tireless, unemotional mechanism fashioned in the image of a man, performing all the functions of a man, moving about stiffly but surely, pulling levers, turning control wheels, wielding broom, pick or shovel.
Medieval contrivers frittered away their talents in constructing lifelike automata that could write a name and play a tune or two, and that outwardly resembled Robots. The modern engineer has no patience with such fantastic creations. …
To drive home the limitations of an actual Robot, let us assume that an engineer undertook to construct one and to endow it with as many human talents as possible. The machine would, of necessity, be brainless, because even the most ingenious technologist cannot make a collection of wheels, shafts, magnets and wires think.
But it could move, hear, see and feel under human control. Instead of legs its creator would give it wheels for simplicity’s sake—wheels which would be driven by electric current supplied either by a battery or a little dynamo mounted within what might be called the “trunk.”
Its eyes would be photoelectric cells that would resemble the familiar vacuum tubes of a radio set and would perceive minute differences of light and darkness. Its ears would be telephone receivers …
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
In December 1927 “The Sun” newspaper of Sydney, Australia published an article titled “The Mechanical Man Marches from Fiction into the Realm of Fact” which contained the following:2
It is obvious that no human ingenuity can give “the electrical man” a brain. There will never be a Robot as conceived by the fiction writers functioning mentally like a man.
In April 1928 “The Red Book Magazine” published a piece by G. K. Chesterton which contained the following:3
Men cannot be educated by machinery; and though there might be a Robot bricklayer or scavenger there will never be a Robot schoolmaster or governess.
In March 1930 the “Tampa Sunday Tribune” of Tampa, Florida published the following humorous note in the classified advertisement section:4
Just about everything now is being done by the radio—and it is still in its infancy. But there will never be a robot that can sell those antiques, knick-knacks, etc., like Tribune Want-Ads. W. A. W.
In 1931 G. K. Chesterton’s article mentioning robots was reprinted in a collection called “The Thing”.5
In 1983 Wayne Coffey published “303 of the World’s Worst Predictions” which contained this item:6
Go get him, R2D2
“There will never be a robot. Even the most ingenious
technologist cannot make a collection of wheels, shafts,
magnets and wires think.”
Waldemar Kaempffert, American science writer (1927)
In conclusion, in 1927 Waldemar Kaempffert wrote about the limitations of robots. He believed that humans would be unable to create electromechanical brains. G. K. Chesterton believed that humans would be unable to build robot schoolmasters or governesses.
Image Notes: Illustration of a golden robot from erik_and_so_on at Pixabay. The image has been cropped and resized.
Acknowledgement: Great thanks to the anonymous person whose inquiry led QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration.
- 1927 October 23, The New York Times, Science Produces the “Electrical Man” by Waldemar Kaempffert, Section 9, Quote Page 1, Column 7, New York. (ProQuest) ↩︎
- 1927 December 4, The Sun, The Mechanical Man Marches from Fiction into the Realm of Fact, Quote Page 25, Column 4, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. (Newspapers_com) link ↩︎
- 1928 April, The Red Book Magazine, Volume 50, Number 6, Why Abolish the Family? by G. K. Chesterton, Start Page 50, Quote Page 51, The Consolidated Magazines Corporation, Chicago, Illinois. (Internet Archive) link ↩︎
- 1930 March 30, Tampa Sunday Tribune, Section: Classified Advertisements, Part 2, Quote Page 6, Column 8, Tampa, Florida. (Newspapers_com) link ↩︎
- 1931, The Thing by G. K. Chesterton, Chapter: The Drift from Domesticity, Quote Page 39, Sheed & Ward, London. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1983, 303 of the World’s Worst Predictions by Wayne Coffey, Chapter 6: It’ll Never Fly: Sci-Tech, Quote Page 62, Tribeca Communications, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎