IT WAS SHORTLY AFTER THE ATTACK on Pearl Harbor that 8-year-old Jack Weeks discovered some boxes and crates stacked in the dark basement of his family’s Mansfield home. Curiosity soon got the better of him, and he lifted the cardboard flaps of a box nearly as tall as him. Inside was the detached humanoid head of a large robot, staring back at him.

Jack wasn’t as shocked as most people would have been — he knew what his father did for a living. But what luck!
Excited now, Jack searched the rest of the basement and discovered a silver torso with long metal arms resting on a dolly. Carefully, he set the head onto the body. The legs were there, too, a long electric cord stretching from a silver foot. When Jack plugged him in, the mechanical man began to talk.

From 1918-1998, Westinghouse was the largest employer in Mansfield, a small hamlet south of Canton. At peak operation during World War II, the plant employed 8,000 local workers. And until 1990, 90 percent of all Westinghouse appliances sold east of the Mississippi were made there. Washers. Radios. Toasters.
But electrical appliances had been slow to catch on at first. Early in the 20th century, light bulbs were for public buildings and business. Well-to-do families had generators in their carriage houses, but this extravagance was too expensive for the average citizen. Companies hoping to trade in this new technology had to dream up ways to convince consumers that they wanted and needed appliances.
In 1924, Westinghouse commissioned engineers to create the world’s first robots. Their names borrowed from a Czech word, robota — meaning slave — these mechanical men were elaborate marketing tools, pitching a better future through electricity, one in which machines toiled while humans simply enjoyed life. They were designed by J.M. Barnett under the supervision of Jack Weeks’ father John, a foreman in the engineering department.
The first robots only vaguely resembled their creators. Televox, for example, looked like a two-dimensional aluminum cutout of a 5-year-old’s self-portrait. Though it couldn’t walk, Televox did vacuum and use the telephone. The body of Rastus, an African-American robot, was made from a batch of Goodyear rubber.
Westinghouse inventors slowly refined the image of their mechanical men. In the early 1930s they constructed a more humanoid robot named Willie Vocalite, who had a barrel-shaped body and movable arms. Through remote control, Willie gave a speech to the passengers of the first commercial flight from New York to San Francisco. And for the 1939 World’s Fair, Barnett designed his masterpiece, Elektro.
Using a combination of vacuum tubes, photoelectric cells, telephone relays and a 78-rpm record player, the 7-foot-tall, 300-pound Elektro performed tasks that astounded audiences across the country. He could walk of his own volition. He could count with his fingers. His photoelectric eyes could distinguish colors. He “smoked” cigarettes, using bellows built into the back of his neck. Properly situated, he could play the piano. And he had a limitless vocabulary, as long as he was supplied with fresh records (a local Kiwanis club used him to tell dirty jokes at their meetings).
People tended to refer to Elektro using “he” or “him,” rarely “it.” His metal face had a strange wistfulness, a wise resignation to an immortal life, that made him seem more than machine.

Barnett’s final design was a companion for Elektro, a robotic dog named Sparko, modeled after a friend’s Scottish Terrier.
“Beg for a hotdog,” Elektro commanded in front of an audience at the World’s Fair in 1940. Sparko rolled onto his haunches, barked, and opened his mouth. Elektro and his dog became emissaries of a fantastic future that never came.
As America was pulled into World War II, John Weeks brought Elektro home, fearing he would be scrapped and turned into guns and tanks. Young Jack was allowed to play with Elektro as long as he was careful. And for the next three years, they played war together in the basement. When the legs weren’t attached, Jack could wheel Elektro around like a tank. Afterwards, Elektro would sometimes enjoy a cigarette.
After the war, Westinghouse disbanded its robotics program. Elektro returned to the company in 1945 and was put to work as an automated spokesman. Jack Weeks grew up, enrolled in Carnegie Tech, and became an engineer like his old man. He, too, worked for Westinghouse after graduation. And since he knew the robot so well, it became his job to maintain Elektro’s mechanical innards.
Then in 1957, Weeks got orders to pack up Elektro once again. He was to be shipped to Palisades Park in Oceanside, California, for permanent display there. The cardboard flaps once more folded over his friend’s head. It was a bittersweet departure. At least in California, he would never rust.
“I never saw him again, until just recently,” says Weeks, now 71 years old. “I just lost contact with him.”
Elektro did not stay in Oceanside long. In 1958 a production company leased him for the cult movie Sex Kittens Go to College, starring Mamie Van Doren, Vampira and Conway Twitty. He played the part of Thinko, the university robot with a penchant for gambling on horses.
In the early ’60s he was shipped back to Mansfield and disassembled. Westinghouse reps presented Elektro’s head to employee Harold Gorsich at his retirement party. Coincidentally, Jack Weeks’s brother Dennis bought Grosich’s house in 1964, along with all the contents of the basement. Inside a box in the basement was Elektro’s handsome head.
“My brother had it on his coffee table for 20 years,” says Weeks. It was a conversation piece. Their father died in 1980, believing the rest of his robot would never be found.

The Mansfield Westinghouse plant died ten years later when White Consolidated Industries purchased the factory and took what it could for its vacuum business. Dennis loaned the head to the last employees for the company’s retirement party in 1990. The local paper ran a story featuring Elektro, and the next day a man stepped into the instrument-calibration factory Weeks owned on the outskirts of town. He said he had worked in maintenance for Westinghouse, and he claimed to have the rest of Elektro in a shed behind his home.
“Make me an offer,” the man said.
“Fifty bucks,” Weeks replied.
The man laughed at him. “It’s worth a million,” he said and walked out.
Weeks couldn’t come close to paying his friend’s ransom. So he waited.

“There was a great hope that technology was going to solve all of mankind’s problems,” says Vicky Matranga, an archivist for the appliance industry in Chicago. She collects machines made during Westinghouse’s mechanical renaissance and is nostalgic for the period’s naïveté. “But I think that optimism in technology disappeared after the nuclear bombs of World War II.”
Matranga was hired by the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio to put together an exhibit on household appliances for their museum in Lancaster in 2003. “I’m on the short list of people who know the history of household goods,” says Matranga.
During the course of her research into Westinghouse, she spoke to several retired engineers. One sent her a package in the mail. Inside was a rolled-up poster in a different language. But she didn’t need to read it to become immediately intrigued. Featured prominently on the poster was a mechanical man built inside the Mansfield plant. Elektro was his name, and she knew she must have him for her exhibition.
Matranga tracked down Jack Weeks. He told her he had heard about this robot, but didn’t know where it was — a white lie. “Jack didn’t know who I was,” she says. “But when I went to his house, he showed me he had the head of Elektro.” She pushed him to save the body before it could be lost forever.
A visit to the home of the man who claimed to have found Elektro’s body in his shed revealed that he had passed on. His widow, though, still hoped to sell the robot body for profit one day. She had given it to a son-in-law for safekeeping. Weeks tracked him down and offered $500. The man took the money and wrote a receipt.
“I could have probably got him for $250,” says Weeks. “But I wanted to give the man enough to make him think it was worth it.”
“He called me up and said his childhood friend was back,” says Matranga, who flew to Mansfield for a short visit with Elektro. She describes the robot as her “favorite man in gray metallic finish.”
Scott Schaut, curator of the Mansfield Memorial Museum, also became obsessed with the Westinghouse robots after learning of Elektro’s return. He designed an exhibit called “The Mechanical Men of Westinghouse,” dedicated to the local engineers responsible for the robots. Elektro got top billing. He also got cleaned up — years spent in a damp shed had rusted his body.
“I teared up a little when I saw he looked new again,” says Weeks. “I hadn’t seen him in so God-darn long. Let’s face it, he’s an attractive robot.”
Unfortunately, Schaut won’t risk plugging him into the wall socket to see if he’ll walk once more. “He hasn’t been greased or oiled since 1958,” he says. “We don’t want him to burn up.”

The exhibit also showcases a replica of Elektro’s grandfather, Televox. They stand at opposite ends of the room, staring at each other in silence.
To Schaut, they are reminders of what could have been. “If the robotics department at Westinghouse had continued after the war, we would be 50 years ahead of where we are right now,” he says. “There’s an arrogance in today’s engineers. They have no interest in these robots. They consider them toys. To them, what is past is only prologue. But there are things on Elektro engineers could still learn from today.”
Since Schaut’s exhibit opened earlier this year, visitors have come from all over the world to see this reconstructed marvel. Though he’s happy his friend is getting the attention he deserves, Weeks is wary of the intentions of some. A Japanese television station wanted so many shots that Weeks worried they planned to reverse-engineer Elektro. So he and Schaut now limit photography. Weeks keeps the only remaining blueprints in locked storage. The only people allowed to see them are some professors from North Central Tech Community College. Over the next few years, students at the school will participate in building a bronze-bodied Elektro with computer components to mimic the functions of the mechanical original.
After the exhibition finishes its run in 2007, Weeks hopes to find Elektro a home at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The Smithsonian, he fears, would just put him in storage.
In the meantime, Weeks prepares for the inevitable goodbye. Whatever his heart might tell him, he knows he is no longer that 8-year-old boy shooting bad guys in the basement. His face shows the distinguished wrinkles of a well-spent life, while the robot’s face looks the same as it did in 1939. When he passes on, Jack wants to know Elektro will be taken care of and that he’ll never be lonely. For that reason, there is one more thing Jack must do. He must find Sparko, Elektro’s trusty companion.

Westinghouse built only one Elektro but produced three Sparkos as pets for the robot. The last confirmed Sparko sighting is around the time Elektro left for California in 1957. No pictures of the dogs have been seen since.
One persistent rumor involving the death of a single Sparko illustrates just how dog-like this robot actually was. Sparko’s eyes were photoelectric cells that propelled the animal toward any light source. As the story goes, an engineer at Westinghouse left a door open one night, and a Sparko was drawn to the street by passing headlights. The robot-dog was hit by a car on Park Avenue.
“Sparko is in one of two places,” says Jack. “Either he’s in a scrap pile in some junkyard, or he’s in a box in someone’s basement or garage. Maybe someone’s grandfather brought  some boxes home from Westinghouse and now nobody has a recollection of what’s inside. I mean, what would you do if you opened a box with an aluminum dog in it?”
Blueprints for Sparko have never been found. It seems his construction was done in haste. “I don’t think they even made prints,” says Jack. “I think they just threw him together.”
Jack believes at least one Sparko still lives in Mansfield. After he ran want ads in the local paper, Jack heard from several people claiming they saw Sparko at a garage sale. Now he constantly seeks out yard sales to see if the dog is being sold with old lamps and toasters. He asks people to search their basements for a Westinghouse box that weighs about 70 pounds.
Today, Jack still tinkers away inside his instruments factory in Mansfield, repairing old machines for corporations. Sometimes he takes a break to visit his old friend at the museum — he has a key to the back door. The metal man towers over the old human, frozen in a pose but otherwise as good as new. Jack remembers their first meeting, so long ago, in the basement and the games that they played together on rainy days.
With luck, one day soon Weeks will arrive with another box, this one containing a silver dog. Then, he can rest easy.

jrenner@freetimes.com