Rosie the Robot, Laboratory Automation and the Second World War, 1941 to 1945

Abstract

In our own day, managers often cite the gains in productivity as the primary reason to automate laboratory operations. This is hardly new. During the second World War, shortages of skilled labor and materials were felt in the chemistry laboratory. Doing more with less was not a matter of corporate policy; it was a matter of national survival. An amazing variety of automated devices were created between 1941 and 1945. Some were designed to save labor such as the automated distillation units seen in the petroleum industry or other organic chemistry laboratories. Certain automatic titrators, polarographs, recording instruments, and water stills also fall into this category. Other equipment was intended to conserve strategic materials, such as an all-glass constant-rate reagent addition device. Still others improved assay performance by automating steps that were prone to human error. Although the technology has changed, the reasons to automate have not. These devices were largely constructed by end users who were working alone. This fact illustrates something else that has not changed; while the driving force in automation is not the hardware, it is the imagination. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Lab Robotics and Automation 9: 105–112, 1997.