A 1980s toy robot arm inspired modern robotics

The shock when you opened up the Armatron expecting a series of electronically controlled motors and found out it contained instead only a single motor that ran continuously and an incredibly ingenious and entirely mechanical train of linkages and gears to implement shoulder (rotating and bending), elbow, wrist (rotating and bending), and gripper, with no electronics at all is almost indescribable. It was simultaneously somehow slightly disappointing (I was hoping to hijack the imagined electronics to modify the thing to be computer controlled) and also just astonishing that such a thing could be designed. You expected electronics but instead got something from the mind of a modern day Da Vinci.

I mean, it was like $40 and sold as a Christmas toy? You get what you pay for.

The Armatron could do nothing productive; it was typically boxed with a few pylons and other plastic tidbits whereby a 10-year-old boy could practice picking them up and stacking them or dropping them back on the table. If you attempted to grip something substantial, there was some protection that would ratchet awhile, or you could just strip the gears, and ruin the toy by December 28th.

It did look really cool. It was ABS plastic but the colors were striking: dark navy blue and a vivid orange. It looked like it was a miniature of something that worked 24/7 in an automobile factory and something that took away jobs, and pensions and homes and electricity, from 11 factory workers in 1985.