Kids love robots the way they love dinosaurs. Collectors know of thousands of toy robots, especially when the myriad variations of color and design are counted separately. The first of the zillions of robot toys produced in the United States was Robert the Robot, introduced by Ideal for the 1954 Christmas toy season.
The Pittsburgh Pirates owned the National League at the start of the 20th century. They won the pennants in 1901, 1902, and 1903 by a total of 41½ games. Then came the disastrous, injury-filled season of 1904 when the club fell to fourth behind the Giants, Cubs, and Reds. John McGraw’s New York team ran away from the rest of the league and refused to play the upstart American League after the season. Pittsburghers undoubtedly took that personally, since the Boston Americans — the same Boston club that upset the Pirates in the one and only 1903 World Series — again won the AL pennant. “Wait until next year” was already the slogan of frustrated fans everywhere.
Baseball fans in Pittsburgh saw good reason to hope that better baseball lay in the offing. So did the press. On January 1, 1905 they looked ahead. Way ahead. The headline in the Pittsburg Press read “London Wins Great Game.”
Amazing Mystery Funnies #10, June 1939, cover art by Bill Everett
Twenty-two-year-old artist Carl Burgos entered comics in 1938. He almost immediately started creating his own features as artist/writer, achieving immortality in the field when an android bizarrely named the Human Torch burst into flames in the legendary Marvel Comics #1 (October 1939), the same issue that introduced Bill Everett’s Sub-Mariner. The Torch’s name got passed on to Johnny Storm when The Fantastic Four debuted and the original received one of the weirdest revivals in comics’ history as the Vision in Avengers #57 (October 1968). (No relation to a 1940s character called the Vision.) The Avengers’ brainier members quickly traced his heritage to that android created by scientist Phineas Horton in 1939, conveniently forgetting that Burgos himself stopped calling him an android after about three issues. For the next decade, the Human Torch seemed to be a regular human whose body was fire, or could be set on fire, or contained fire, or something else equally unclear. The Golden Age lacked continuity police.
Probably only a few comics historians understand how obsessed Burgos was with artificial people. Just before the Human Torch he created a cyborg or robot named Iron Skull whose origin story changed every couple of issues and a few months later he produced an unquestioned android, Manowar the White Streak. Despite the name, Manowar was a utopian who fought evil in the cause of peace. (And wasn’t white. And not the same as Paul Gustavson’s contemporary Man of War for the same company. Writing comics history is footnotes all the way down.)
Comic books were so new in 1939 that, like Leacock’s Lord Ronald, they rode madly off in all directions. Superman, the the sensation of 1938, spawned more of what we now call superheroes but they didn’t dominate. The 64-page comic books had already made a swift transition from reprinting newspaper comic strips, with 30 or more titles inside a single book, to all-new titles containing eight stories (seven pages each to account for ads and filler material) and eight different heroes. How they decided which contributed to sales is anyone’s guess, although letters from kids surely guided them, but tables of contents changed virtually every issue.
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Other Worlds, May 1951. Cover by Hannes Bok
Other Worlds Science Fiction launched in November 1949, part of the boom in f&sf magazines in a postwar world that retroactively realized their worth after real life rockets and atomic bombs made headlines. It was frankly third-tier, half written by Rog Phillips under pseudonyms and half by younger writers striving to make their mark. After a year or two, though, some bigger names like Ray Bradbury, A. E. van Vogt, and Robert Bloch were lured in and a few of the newcomers would develop into stars of equal rank. Even so, fans read it for fun and excitement, not literary quality. Issue after issue sated with a plenitude of humor stories, starting with the Hoka series by young Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson, and robot stories, including ones by Bradbury, van Vogt, and Bloch, and humorous robot stories, many by authors nobody remembers (such as Hodge Winsell, whose two atrocities comprise his entire f&sf oeuvre).
One reason for the increase in quality was hidden from readers. The editor for the first issue was listed as Robert N. Webster, another pseudonym. Knowledgeable fans would have been tipped off by the presence of “The Fall of Lemuria” by Richard S. Shaver, a true screwball who might have believed in his stories about an alien civilization hidden within the Earth. Ray Palmer had pushed circulation at Amazing Stories to the f&sf magazine peak with Shaver until his bosses grew tired of the slime on their fingers. Sure enough, Robert N. Webster was Ray Palmer and Other Worlds was headed down that same path.
And then the horribly unlucky Palmer, who grew up hunched and dwarfed after a car accident when he was seven, slipped, fell, and became temporarily paralyzed from the waist down. A 21-year-old fan, Bea Mahaffey, who was already on the payroll as Managing Editor, i.e. editor of scutwork, quietly took over, adding Marge Budwig Saunder to replace her hands-on jobs. Today it’s given that the sudden veer away from Shaver and toward solid second-tier status is attributable to Mahaffey.
A robot on radio? What would be the point?
You might ask what was the point of a ventriloquist on radio, but Edgar Bergen made himself a multi-gazillionaire by ignoring other people’s considerations of sense or logic.
Bergen’s success with Charlie McCarthy was still a year off when Reuben Garrett Lucius “Rube” Goldberg had another of his incredibly numerous bright ideas. The cartoonist introduced the strip Mike and Ike (They Look Alike) in 1907. Calling lookalikes by those names became part of the language. So did the obscure slang term “boob” after Goldberg started the strip starring Boob McNutt in 1915. You think Al Jaffee created the bit Snappy Answers to Foolish Questions? Off by about a half-century. Goldberg’s Foolish Questions started appearing in 1915.
Not a bad legacy, though they all pale to his supreme cartoon invention — the Rube Goldberg machine. That term entered the dictionary, too, “accomplishing by complex means what seemingly could be done simply.” Above and below are a couple of examples from the early 1920s.
Franklin Roosevelt had only one true ideology during the Great Depression: try it, maybe it will work. The range of innovative,productive, uplifting, unworkably idealistic, and just plan crazy plans had something for everybody to love and to hate. Federal Project Number One exemplified these extremes.
FPN1 devoted itself to the radical idea that creatives were human beings deserving of dignity and of meaningful work inside their professions. And to the even more radical idea that it would hire qualified minds without discrimination regarding race, creed, color, religion or political affiliation. Over the few years from its start in 1935 until World War II the creatives of FPN1 created lasting monuments of American culture.
Although names mutated rapidly, as Roosevelt’s alphabet agencies were wont to do, most people have probably heard the usual titles of FPN1’s subgroups, The Federal Writers Project, the Federal Art Project, the Federal Theater Project, and the Historical Records Survey. Perhaps least known is the Federal Music Project (FMP), which concentrated on highbrow performances of original music, as guaranteed a portent of ephemerality as can be found in American culture.
Sidney, the Screwloose Robot, illustration by
Julian S. Krupa (Fantastic Adventures, June 1941)
Who first came up with three laws of robotics? Want three guesses? Try. Isaac Asimov? No. John W. Campbell? No. William P. McGivern? Yes. William P. McGivern? That seems impossible, but there it is in black and white. “You must be industrious, you must be efficient, you must be useful. Those are the three laws that are to govern your behavior.”
McGivern was only 21 when in 1940 he became one of Ray Palmer’s house writers for Amazing and Fantastic Adventures. In-house writers, really, for he shared an office with David Wright O’Brien at the Ziff-Davis Chicago headquarters. Thirty-five of his stories appeared under various names in those two magazines in 1941, along with a picture that makes him look about twelve.
Buried deep in the June 1941 issue of Fantastic Adventures lay “Sidney, the Screwloose Robot,” part of the plague of farcical stories Palmer demanded and often titled. (Others from McGivern in 1941: “The Quandary of Quintus Quaggle,” “Al Addin and the Infra-Red Lamp,” and “Rewbarb’s Remarkable Radio”)