Black Gate

You can’t get your science fiction merit badge without knowing that Isaac Asimov’s robots were made by the fictional U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., founded in 1982, the same year Susan Calvin was born. (Yes, that means she’s a millennial. She joined the firm in 2008, if it comes up in a trivia contest.)

When people see the name of the firm they immediately start to wonder what the difference is between a robot and a mechanical man. Some people. Me, mostly. I’ve never found anybody else asking the question. But I can’t tell you how much it bugs me. If a company has both names it must make both things. Yet nowhere in I, Robot or The Rest of the Robots does Asimov so much as mention a mechanical man or differentiate his robots in any way. Robots by the score but no mechanical men or for that matter mechanical women.

Others did. He probably didn’t know it at the time, but Asimov was scooped. A real world firm had been started in 1938. Its name was Mechanical Man, Inc.

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It was front page news in the Pocono Record, serving Stroudsberg, PA, on August 8, 1955. The headline read: “‘Mr. Rivets’ Show Filmed for Television/At Waterfront Farm Near Marshalls Creek.” Intrepid Record reporter Leonard Randolph drove his ancient station wagon the seven miles from town to check out the famous Philadelphia television star for the locals.

Look, I says to an intelligent-looking young boy of about seven standing near a tree, what’s this Mr. Rivets like?

In the manner children reserve for their plodding elders, the boy turned and said, he’s funny.

He turned back to the tree. Another man, standing nearby, spoke up, rather ill-advisedly it turned out. Well, he says, what makes him funny?

The boy fixed this innocent bystander with a gaze you might imagine someone giving to a soggy pork chop left over from lunch three days before. What makes anything funny? he asked.

That answer is so perfect that I’m tempted to end this article here, even before the Read More jump. What can I say that would top such wisdom? Nevertheless, join me after the jump and I’ll fill in the backstory of “Television’s original mechanical man.”

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It’s 1962. You are Irwin Donenfeld, executive vice president for DC Comics, the 800-pound gorilla of superhero comics. You are riding high on the Silver Age of comics, having revived superhero comics from their near-death experience at the hands of Fredric Wertham, the New York District Attorney, and Congress itself. A dozen new versions of 1940s legends have poured from your offices since 1956 along with brand-new successes. The secret? Showcase, a comic invented purely to give tryouts to comic concepts and get the fans, the readers, the buyers to write in insisting that one or another of them be given their own titles. The Barry Allen Flash emerged from Showcase #4, The Challengers of the Unknown in #6, Lois Lane in #8, Green Lantern in #22, Aquaman in #30, the Atom in #34.

Now you’re a victim of your own success. The Atom, after also appearing in Showcases #35 and #36, is a smash. He’s getting his own title. But he was supposed to appear in Showcase #37, March-April 1962, as well, which is due at the printer in two weeks, and you don’t want to use him again. What do you do?

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I used to live in the pleasant village of Fairport, NY, a short walk from the Erie Canal, by which inland Fairport got its name. A reminder of those industrial days could be found about a mile east along the canal in a long four-story factory owned by the American Can Company. Canco, as locals called it, had been formed in 1901 as one of the 300+ trusts that gobbled up every industry in America into impregnable monopolies. The tin-plate trust was never as famous as Rockefeller’s Standard Oil or Carnegie’s United States Steel yet played just as critical a part in the average household. Canned foods were another hot new technology, because a new method of sealing the cans without solder had just been perfected by the well-named Sanitary Can Company, which ran their experiments in Fairport. After a steep learning curve, leading to many bulging botulistic cans quietly being dumped in the canal, Sanitary perfected the means of crimping can tops on to the body, made of corrosion resistant tinplate steel, the familiar tin can of today. American Can swallowed Sanitary Can in 1908.

World War II changed everything, including food. Millions of young families fled cities for the open spaces of the suburbs and their increasingly gigantic supermarkets, filled with endless aisles of canned foods. Those promised ease from the hours of cooking known by their mothers. Poppy Cannon, author of the Can-Opener Cookbook, apotheosized the tool as “the open sesame to freedom . . . from tedium, space, work, and your own inexperience.”

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Would be Tom Swifts in the 1950s had a huge advantage that earlier generations of teens lacked. They had junk. Piles of it. After two decades of needing to keep every piece of machinery and electronics running because parts and replacements were impossible to come by or too expensive to buy, the booming post-war economy finally allowed families to slide aside the old in favor of the new. One old habit remained. The junk didn’t get tossed. Much of it accumulated in corners of the amazing new rooms called garages that city-dwellers found attached to their new suburban homes.

Tom Swift wasn’t the first to emulate, nor was his ilk confined to fiction. The occasional lucky boy with indulgent and well-to-do parents turned their homes into miniature Menlo Parks as soon as batteries and wires and bulbs appeared. L. Frank Baum wrote about his 15-year-old son Rob in 1902.

He fitted up the little back room in the attic as his workshop, and from thence a net-work of wires soon ran throughout the house. Not only had every outside door its electric bell, but every window was fitted with a burglar alarm; moreover no one could cross the threshold of any interior room without registering the fact in Rob’s workshop. The gas was lighted by an electric fob; a chime, connected with an erratic clock in the boy’s room, woke the servants at all hours of the night and caused the cook to give warning; a bell rang whenever the postman dropped a letter into the box; there were bells, bells, bells everywhere, ringing at the right time, the wrong time and all the time. And there were telephones in the different rooms, too, through which Rob could call up the different members of the family just when they did not wish to be disturbed.

(You can read more about the book Rob inspired, The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale: Founded Upon the Mysteries of Electricity and the Optimism of Its Devotees. It Was Written for Boys but Others May Read It. at Baum’s Magic Pills on my FlyingCarsandFoodPills website.)

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Since 1911, boys have looked forward to the monthly appearance of Boy’s Life. I was a scout from 1961 through 1968, when the magazine was as large as Life or Look and almost as fat, a cornucopia of articles, scouting tips, stories, and comics. I saw Arthur C. Clarke’s “Sunjammer” in the March 1964 issue, a full year before the adult sf mags reprinted it. The editors at Boy’s Life stayed consistently more friendly to science fiction than virtually any other mainstream magazine in the 50s and 60s. Robert Heinlein serialized Farmer in the Sky and The Rolling Stones there and he and Asimov had books adapted into comics. For me the big draw were the Time Machine stories about the Polaris Patrol who discovered, what else, a time machine and explored the past and the future. Written by the father son team of Donald Monroe and Keith Monroe under the name of Donald Keith, a hardback version of their serialized Mutiny in the Time Machine might have been the first science fiction book I owned.

So how is it possible that I have zero memory of Space Conquerors!?

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