William T. Townsend
American businessman
Bill Townsend founded Barrett Technology in 1988. He is an entrepreneur and inventor credited with introducing the WAM® arm, the first haptic robot and one of the first haptic devices based on novel differential and high-speed cable drives. Recent patents cover both medical products and the Puck® brushless motor controllers with substantial funding from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Bill obtained his MS and PhD degrees in Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984 and 1988 respectively. He received a BS in 1982 from Northeastern University. He has been awarded nineteen US patents and many additional international equivalents and has won several professional awards including the A3--Association for Advancing Automation and Robotics: Joseph Engelberger Award pioneering the first haptic robot (WAM arm®) designed in the 1980s at the MIT AI Lab (now CSAIL) to interact physically with people.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “William T. Townsend” is american businessman. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through William, Townsend and American, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “american businessman” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
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 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8019135. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1988, 1984 and 1982.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “William T. Townsend”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow William T. Townsend primary sources, William T. Townsend archive and William research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “William T. Townsend”?
- What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
- Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “William T. Townsend” 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.