George Devol
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George Charles Devol Jr. (February 20, 1912 –), born in Louisville, Kentucky, is the inventor of the first industrial robot.
George Devol, a self-made engineer and pioneer of industrial robotics. He developed the first programmable robot in 1954 and started the first robot arm company (Unimation) with Joseph F. Engelberger in 1956. He also made contributions to the field of industrial automation in machine vision and bar coding.
In 1954 he applied for a patent - the first of its kind - for a "universal manipulator". But it was to be 12 years before Devol saw production, and only since 1980 that the world has really discovered the second industrial revolution - the Industrial Robot.
From his patents in the 1930s for photoelectric doors - not too different from what we use today - through his pioneering in the electronics industry as an independent producer, Devol has held over 40 patents. He has 30 patents for the industrial robot alone, which form the basis of the industry and have earned him the title of "Father of Robotics". Devol is one of the last of that rare breed of inventor/entrepreneurs whose direct antecedent would seem to have been Thomas Edison.
[edit] History
Born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1912, Devol was interested from boyhood in all things mechanical - boats, airplanes, and engines.
Image:GCD Childhood Home Louisville.jpg
He got some practical experience at Riordan Academy, where, in addition to studying traditional subjects, he "built buildings and ran the school's electric light plant".
Although he "wasn't very scholarly," Devol remembers, he read everything he could about mechanical devices - trying to discover what, besides building radios, could be done with the then recently invented vacuum tubes.
Devol explains that what spurred him on was the belief that "if you want to be an expert in something, you better not be in something everybody else is in ... try to get into something new."
Choosing to forego higher education, in 1932 Devol went into business for himself, forming United Cinephone to produce "variable area recording" directly onto film for the new talkies.
Image:United Cinephone Brochure p1.jpg
When he discovered that large companies like RCA and Western Electric were working in the same area, however, he decided to discontinue the product. The company did continue to manufacture photoelectric doors and other products using photoelectric cells.
United Cinephone also manufactured lighting for garment factories, another product Devol patented.
It also manufactured phonograph arms and amplifiers. In fact, Devol installed amplifiers at the Cotton Club and enjoyed watching Count Basie, Fred Waring and others, occasionally taking in the after-hours jam session (preferring Waring's more melodic jam sessions to Basie's "craziness").
In 1939 United Cinephone installed automated counters at New York World's Fair to count customers entering the fairgrounds.
Looking back fondly, he recalls "back then you had to tell people you were in the "radio controls" business because nobody had ever heard of "electronics". "There were so many things that needed to be invented, all you had to do was look around".
Around the time the World War II began, Devol dissolved United Cinephone and offered his services to Sperry Gyroscope, where he helped to develop radar scanners.
In 1943, knowing that counter-radar measures would be useful, he formed General Electronics as a subsidiary of the Auto Ordinance Corporation to produce counter-radar devices until the end of the war. General Electroncis quickly became the country's largest radar counter-measure company and ultimately had over 2,000 employees . The company's radar counter-measure systems were on the allied planes on D-Day.
Devol was also part of the team that devloped the first commercial use of microwave oven technology, the Speedy Weeny which automatically cooked and dispensed hotdogs in places such as Grand Central Station.
After a short stint as eastern sales manager of electronics products for RCA, which he felt "wasn't his ball of wax", he left to develop some ideas which led eventually to the patent application for the first industrial robot.
"I started thinking about magnetic recording systems which had been used during the war," Devol explains, "I said to myself, 'this sounds good, but what's wrong with it if you wanted to do more with it?' It was a dynamic recording system - it had to be in motion to record". In 1946, he came up with the answer, and applied for a patent on a magnetic recording system for controlling machines (the same year the computer emerges for the first time). "I thought of a static recording where you would put the information onto a disk, go in with servomechanisms to the track you wanted, and pick the information out - pretty standard in the computer industry today."
Image:First DC Magnetic Recorder.jpg Photo of the first DC magnetic recorder which used a saw blade to record information.
He wasn't thinking about robots back then; he was thinking about manipulators and his patent on magnetic recording devices. He "felt the world was ready for new ideas" as he saw the introduction of automation into factories about this time. But with the development of the computer in the late 1940s and the invention of the transistor, all the ingredients for an industrial robot were available.
With all this background, George Devol worked on his invention. In 1954, he applied for patent No. 2,988,237 for "Universal Automation" or "Unimation", coining the word (at the suggestion of his wife, Evelyn) to define the product much as George Eastman had coined "Kodak".
Image:Original Robot Patent.jpg
When he filed the patent for a programmable method for transferring articles between different parts of a factory, he wrote: "The present invention makes available for the first time a more or less general purpose machine that has universal application to a vast diversity of applications where cyclic control is desired."
In 1961, his patent was granted.
Devol tried to find a company willing to give him financial backing to develop this "programmable articles transfer system" and talked with almost every major corporation in the United States in his search." "I began to have a very dim view of American industry in the process" he remembers. The attitudes he met with, he says, ranged from "who needs it?" to "it's crazy" or "we can do it better".
Eventually he was put in touch with Manning, Maxwell and Moorehead in Connecticut, whose chief of engineering in the aircraft products division was Joseph Engleberger. Engleberger was very interested, and Devol agreed to sell the company his patent and some future patents in the field. Just as this decision was being made, however, Dresser Industries bought the company and couldn't see the need for an aircraft division, industrial robot patents notwithstanding.
Engleberger and Devol looked around for a backer to buy out that division and came up with Consolidated Diesel Electronic (Condec), which agreed to put up the financing and continue development of the robot. This new division was called Unimation, and Joseph Engleberger because its president.
In 1961, the first Unimate robot was shipped from Danbury, Connecticut.
Five million dollars was spent to develop the first Unimates. In 1966, after many years of market surveys and field tests, production began. Their first robot is a material handling robot and is soon followed by robots for welding and other applications.
Although Devol personally sold the first robot to General Motors in 1960 (installed in 1961 in a plant in Trenton, New Jersey to lift hot pieces of metal from a die-casting machine and stack them), initially it was the European companies that saw the necessity for large purchases. "At one time", Devol says indignantly, "Fiat had more machines than anyone in the world."
In 1975, Unimation showed its first profit.
In 1978, the Puma (Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly) robot is developed by Unimation from Vicarm (developed by Victor Scheinman) techniques and with support from General Motors.
Devol later obtained patents on visual and tactile sensors for robots, non-refillable containers, and magnetostrictive manipulators or "microrobotics", a field he created. Microrobotics is based on the scientific principal that if you "take a piece of metal and excite it with a high frequency voltage, it will grow by an absolute fixed amount. This is true for nickel and other materials in that family. You could make a robot out of it. It hasn't been applied yet; maybe $10 million later we'll have apiece of equipment. The only application I see at the present time is disconnecting microcircuits." (from a 1982 interview)
[edit] Famous Quotes
“Anything that is manufactured is manipulated. Every part is manipulated while it is made. Every part is manipulated while is assembled. A part is manipulated when it is delivered from a plant. Everything is manipulated.” George C. Devol, Jr. (interview, 3/11/83)
Devol insists he has never read a science fiction book in his life nor seen a science fiction movie.
When asked about the possibility of robots eventually dominating mankind, he muses "if people are stupid enough to let that happen, maybe they deserve it." (interview, June, 2006)
He says with the quiet pride of accomplishment "You know, there aren't many people who get a chance to start a whole new industry". (interview, 1982)
