1950’s celebrity robot goes on world tour

Tony Sale’s 1950’s creation of George the Robot has just left The National Museum of Computing to go on a world tour with a Science Museum exhibition.

George will join the new touring Science Museum exhibition exploring the 500-year story of humanoid robots and the artistic and scientific quest to understand what it means to be human.

Constructed in the 1950s by the man who later led the team to rebuild Colossus, George is made of recycled aluminium from a crashed Wellington Bomber. The robot was one of Tony Sale’s early ventures into electronics when he was a Pilot Officer at RAF Debden in Essex. It took him three weeks to build George in 1950 and he created quite a stir at the time, even attracting the attention of Pathé News.

Pathé Newsreel clip from 18 December 1950: http://www.britishpathe.com/video/robot/query/george+the+robot