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Why, oh why, would you want to make a robot smoke!? Good question. Nonetheless, people have made smoking robots. And since we like robots with non-obvious behavior, we decided to list some here.
The fabulous Museum Speelklok in Utrecht (NL) displays an automaton of a smoking Moorish gentleman, created somewhere in the 18-hundreds (signed "Doullion, 1880").
Automata like this are often considered the predecessors of modern humanoid robots. Other cigarette addicted automata at Museum Speelklok include a smoking Turk and a smoking painters pallet, no kidding!
Elektro was a humanoid robot built by Westinghouse Electric Corporation around 1937-1938. And, as you may have guessed, it smoked cigarettes...
This video shows Elektro at the 1939 New York World's Fair. At 2m49s it happily accepts an offered cigarette, and starts puffing.
We certainly can't wait for "Carlos the Coughing Robot".
Also from around 1938 is "Robert" the smoking robot from Kettering (UK). Not much is known about how it functioned, but reputedly it could direct traffic while smoking a fag.
Perhaps the best thing about Robert the Robot was not that it smoked, but how it came to exist.... It's inventor Charles Lawson claimed that "Someone bet me £5 I could not make a robot in three weeks."
Screw robots! We need more men like Charles Lawson!
(photo from Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph, source)
We heard rumors that Hiroshi Ishiguro's twin-robot Geminoid smokes. Although we met Ishiguro (in 2009) and can confirm that he himself smoked at the time, we can find no indication that his robot does so too.
(photo by Florian Voggeneder / Ars Electronica, source)
If you think that smoking machines or robots are no longer made, well... they are! Companies like Vitrocell and Cambustion (founded by a research group at Cambridge University) create them to test cigarettes and e-smoking equipment.
In December 2016 Dutch media reported that cigarette tests with such machines duped authorities just as Volkswagen did in the Dieselgate scandal.
(the video from wired.com shows a cigarette smoking robot created by the Wyss Institute at Harvard University)
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