Back then, he must have been every housewife’s dream.
It wasn’t just those steely good looks, or that broad, manly chest. Not even the mischievous twinkle in his light-sensitive eyes.
George the amazing, life-size robot promised one service that few men were prepared to offer in the pre-liberation days of the early 1950s.
He did the housework.
Here, at last, was a chance for every hard-working mum to escape the daily drudgery of cleaning, scrubbing and polishing.
Newspaper photographs showed the 6ft metal marvel smiling as he appeared to vacuum the house and carry home the shopping before baking a cake. Why, he even seemed to enjoy mowing the lawn.
But yesterday the man who built George - and brought him back to life nearly half a century later - confessed there was more than a little fiction alongside the science that created Britain’s most celebrated robot.
Those early photographs of George doing the chores were simply posed for the cameras. And inventor Tony Sale had to break it to his new bride when he married her in 1953 that not much was going to change around the house just yet.
No wonder George was destined to spend so long gathering dust in the garage. Nor did the futuristic dream of a do-it-all robot progress much in the years that followed.
Now, however, George has been reborn. In a remarkable tribute to Mr Sale’s technical genius - not to mention George’s longevity - the all-British robot was brought back to life with just a few drops of oil and a couple of new batteries. But he still can’t do the housework. “I’m afraid that was just a myth,” the 79-year-old ex-MI5 spycatcher and RAF officer told me.
“But he seemed to capture everyone’s imagination simply because he could walk. It was quite a sensation at the time.”
The remarkably resilient robot is the last in a proud line of Georges created by Mr Sale, starting with a 1ft- high clockwork model made from Meccano.
Despite being built of scrap aluminium from a crashed Wellington bomber, with parts that cost less than £20 at the time, George’s joints largely replicate the human body’s. Like the Tin Man in Wizard of Oz, on whom he was modelled, he has no heart. But he does have a motor in each foot, which propels him via wheels in his soles. A series of relay switches controls his movements.
“I think he really impressed people because he looked so lifelike,” Mr Sale said. “Unfortunately I wasn’t able to improve him any further, or enable him to become an intelligent robot with a memory, because computers weren’t developed enough at the time.”
George became a star attraction during open days at RAF Debden, Essex, where Mr Sale did national service and trained pilots to use radar. Then, after all the fanfare, exile. Mr Sale moved on to other projects, such as rebuilding the “Colossus” computer at Bletchley Park, the hub of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. George, meanwhile, languished in Mr Sale’s garage in Bedford - for 45 years.
“He was covered in dust but I brushed off the cobwebs, put some oil on the bearings and gave him a couple of new lithium batteries. I just switched him on and away he went. It was a lovely moment.”
Mr Sale has donated George to Bletchley Park’s National museum of Computing, where the robot is on display. And the housework? “He never actually got round to that,” Mr Sale’s wife Margaret said. “If only he could.”- Daily Mail