In 1966, British inventor Dennis Weston, who lived in Leeds, England, created Tinker, a radio-controlled robot servant that could wash the car, mow the lawn, take the baby for a walk, and go shopping. It was a peek into a future where robots handled everyday chores.
Tinker was no ordinary toy. It was equipped with 120 electric motors, a zoom camera, a memory bank, and a 29-channel radio receiver. Standing about two meters tall, the robot could perform 180 different tasks. However, it couldn't travel more than two miles from Dennis's garage, where he controlled it using a television screen to see what Tinker had in front of it, along with controllers to adjust its movements.
Things took a turn for the worse in 1974, when Weston ran out of space to keep the robot at home and gave it to his friend Brian, who owned a shop called Leeds Radio that sold surplus army radio equipment.
Martin Dennis, son of Tinker's inventor, shared the robot's fate in a comment on Cyberneticzoo: “Most of the equipment that passed through Brian's shop was eventually dismantled and sold as spare parts. Unfortunately, the same happened to Tinker.”
Dennis Weston had thousands of unfinished projects before his death at the age of 71 in 1995, but Tinker remained his most advanced work for the era.
Tinker in Photos
