Roy James Wensley, born in 1888, dropped out of school shortly after the turn of the 20th century in order to support his mother. Days he worked as a linesman and electrician's helper; nights he studied at his kitchen table, finally getting a mail-order diploma. His story continues to read like a parody of a pious boy's novel; he really did offer to work for the electrical giant Westinghouse for a month without pay to prove that he could compete with the educated engineers. They hired him and then sent him to purgatory, a sublimely non-glamorous job that involved figuring out a way to send signals to distant switch stations.

Wensley did, even making it user-friendly. Pick up a telephone and send a tone to the switch. Different tones, different commands, different results. He got called into headquarters in 1927 to demonstrate. The higher ups were all male and all engineers. They loved toys, loved playing with toys, and deep down inside saw all gadgets as toys. They called in everybody in the building and said, essentially, "Hey, come play with this!"

Without knowing it, Wensley invented the Robot. He had no clue, though, until one of the Westinghouse publicists saw it. As Wensley later wrote, he said "Why you have a mechanical man there. This is a good story for the newspapers." Maybe he did. Maybe it was that simple. The resulting story - "a mechanical servant solving all the housekeeping problems of the ages" ran in so many papers that Wensley had to buy a world atlas to find out where Tanzania and Ceylon were.