Joseph Engelberger
American physicist, engineer and entrepreneur (1925–2015)
Joseph Frederick Engelberger (July 26, 1925 – December 1, 2015) was an American physicist, engineer and entrepreneur. Often regarded as the "Father of Robotics". Licensing the original patent awarded to inventor George Devol, Engelberger developed the first industrial robot in the United States, the Unimate, in the 1950s. Later, he worked as entrepreneur and vocal advocate of robotic technology beyond the manufacturing plant in a variety of fields, including service industries, health care, and space exploration.
Biography
Early life and education
Joseph Frederick Engelberger was born on July 26, 1925, in Brooklyn, New York. He grew up in Connecticut during the Great Depression, but later returned to New York City for his college education.
Engelberger received his B.S. in physics in 1946, and M.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1949 from Columbia University. He worked as an engineer with Manning, Maxwell and Moore, where he met inventor George Devol at a Westport cocktail party in 1956, two years after Devol had designed and patented a rudimentary industrial robotic arm. However, Manning, Maxwell and Moore was sold and Engelberger's division was closed that year.
Unimation
Finding himself jobless but with a business partner and an idea, Engelberger co-founded Unimation with Devol, creating the world's first robotics company.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joseph Engelberger” 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.