Man`s mixed relationship with robots goes back to ancient times, when Greeks envisioned ``automatons`` to open temple doors automatically and mechanized sculptural pieces that would go through a number of complex movements.
Later, during the Industrial Revolution, the Luddite riots erupted around factories, and workers took to destroying the automated machines that were putting them out of work. Around this time, in 1818, the book ``Frankenstein`` was published.
A current exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry, 57th Street and Lake Shore Drive, tracks our centuries-old relationship with these machines.
``The Robot Exhibit: History, Fantasy and Reality`` walks the visitor through the early musings of alchemists who searched for some ``key to artificial life.`` Also on display are glockenspiel-like devices, images from science fiction and thoroughly modern machines that are run by sophisticated computers. Some of these, it is said, will someday mow our lawns.
The word ``robot`` was first used in the satirical play ``R.U.R.`` in 1921, by Czech writer Karel Capek. In the play, alien creatures sprang from an organism in a soup factory and terrorized the world--a scenario inspired by the first mechanized war, World War I. Robot is derived from ``robota,`` which means forced labor in Czech. In 1926, the German film ``Metropolis`` featured the vampish robot Maria. Photos and explanations of these productions are on view in the exhibit.
As the century progressed, more ideas about robots were circulated. Many were troubling, but by the time Isaac Asimov wrote about them in the 1940s, they began taking on benign characteristics. And as if the literature provided self-fulfilling prophecy, the 1960s saw real-life experiments with robots
--many of them from Japan, such as a five-fingered mechanical hand on view in this exhibit.
Our imagination never really ceases when it comes to machines that can do our work for us (which is good) and that seem to have a will of their own
(which is bad). Artists use the motif, as in the work of Clayton Bailey, who incorporates numerous electrical and mechanical devices that make us see these components as vital parts of his strange creatures.
On display are a number of toy robots, some of which look like science-fiction folk art and some that we may recognize as toys that were once under Christmas trees. Little by little these ``toys`` take on more useful roles. An Armatron is a robot arm made by the toy maker Tomy that children can manipulate to pick up balls and other small objects.
The exhibit was produced by New York`s American Craft Museum II in 1984. It was then that an official of the Museum of Science and Industry saw it and suggested that it come to Chicago. Though it is more an entertainment than an exhibition of industrial applications, visitors will be impressed with how it portrays the evolution of an idea from its ancient beginnings to economic usefulness--images of Frankenstein notwithstanding.