Elektro
humanoid robot
Elektro is a robot built by J.M. Barnett, Jack Weeks Sr., Harold Gorsuch, and other engineers at the Westinghouse Electric Corporation's Mansfield, Ohio, facility between 1937 and 1938.
Physical specifications
Seven feet tall (2.1 m), weighing 265 pounds (120 kg), humanoid in appearance, he could walk by voice command, speak about 700 words (using a 78-rpm record player), smoke cigarettes, blow up balloons, and move his head and arms. Elektro's body consisted of a steel gear, cam and motor skeleton covered by an aluminum skin. His photoelectric "eyes" could distinguish red and green light.
Exhibit history
Elektro was on exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair and was joined at that fair in 1940, with "Sparko", a robot dog that could bark, sit, and beg to humans.
Several minutes of color sound footage of Elektro in action can be seen at 33:55 in the movie, The Middleton Family at the New York World's Fair, a fully-produced hour-long movie made by Westinghouse, which showcased the Westinghouse pavilion.
Elektro toured North America in 1950 in promotional appearances for Westinghouse, and was displayed at Pacific Ocean Park in Ocean Park, Santa Monica, California, "which was in operation from 1958 to 1967, as part of the House of Tomorrow exhibit.
Elektro appeared as "Thinko", in Sex Kittens Go to College (1960).
Property dispute
All original pieces of Elektro were eventually located and restored. Elektro was on display at The Mansfield Memorial Museum in Mansfield, Ohio.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Elektro” is humanoid robot. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Elektro, humanoid and robot, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1112027. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1937, 1938, 1939 and 1940.
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This entry incorporates text from “Elektro” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.