Remembering reading about Elektro as a kid — had a whole children's book from the 70s detailing various robots that presented them as in-use for a range of activities from security to factories, which in retrospect seemed selling the capabilities quite a bit.
Surprised that this wasn't a Mechanical Turk-style set up, but it did seem to actually respond to "voice commands," though with some clever (if brittle) hacks:
> An operator gave voice commands to Elektro through a microphone, but the robot didn’t actually understand the words. According to an article in the August 1939 issue of Radio-Craft magazine, the voice commands were carefully timed syllabic codes, which were turned into electrical pulses by a grid-glow tube [PDF]. The pulse opened a shutter in front of a lightbulb, sending a flash signal across the room to a photoelectric tube in the robot’s control unit, located offstage. This “electric eye” translated the signal into an electric current and transmitted it through telephone relays to start Elektro’s gears whirring.
Surprised that this wasn't a Mechanical Turk-style set up, but it did seem to actually respond to "voice commands," though with some clever (if brittle) hacks:
> An operator gave voice commands to Elektro through a microphone, but the robot didn’t actually understand the words. According to an article in the August 1939 issue of Radio-Craft magazine, the voice commands were carefully timed syllabic codes, which were turned into electrical pulses by a grid-glow tube [PDF]. The pulse opened a shutter in front of a lightbulb, sending a flash signal across the room to a photoelectric tube in the robot’s control unit, located offstage. This “electric eye” translated the signal into an electric current and transmitted it through telephone relays to start Elektro’s gears whirring.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/elektro-the-motoman-had-the-bi...