Unimate, the first industrial robot

In 1961 a Unimate robot began work at a General Motors die-casting plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey, lifting hot metal pieces from the casting machine and stacking them. It was a hydraulic arm on a base, programmed by a magnetic drum memory to repeat a sequence of movements. The inventor George Devol, who had filed his patent in 1954, and the engineer and businessman Joseph Engelberger, who founded Unimation to build it, are credited as its creators.¹

Unimate was built on factory production methods such as Ford's moving assembly line of 1913, which had broken work into repetitive tasks, and on the electronics that grew out of the transistor, which allowed machines to store and follow instructions. Devol had imagined 'universal automation', a general-purpose machine that could be taught different tasks, and the name Unimation reflects this. The first jobs were ones people disliked: handling hot, heavy pieces in noisy, dangerous conditions. Engelberger spent years persuading managers that such an expensive machine was worth buying, and in its first decade the company struggled to make money.¹

Interest grew after 1969, when Japanese manufacturers, led by Kawasaki, licensed the technology, and car makers adopted spot-welding robots in large numbers. Engelberger also popularized the machine with a 1966 appearance on The Tonight Show, where Unimate poured a beer and conducted an orchestra. By 2023 the International Federation of Robotics counted around 4 million industrial robots working in factories worldwide, led by China, Japan, the United States and South Korea. Automation continues to reshape manufacturing jobs and raises a long-running debate about work and technology.²