Captain Future? Not So Much

Back in the 1950s, all the forward-looking magazines like Popular Science and Life promised us a bright, clean 21st century with all kinds of Jetsons-style wonders and conveniences, like cities on the moon, meals in pills, jet cars, smart houses, and household robots.

Boy, did they get it wrong.

Not only are we still waiting on jet cars, smart houses, and the lunar cities (they can keep the meal pills), they somehow missed the electronics revolution that put a computer on every desk. But they did get a couple of things right, and one of them was the use of robots in the home.

You may be thinking "Huh?!" right about now, but that's only because you've forgotten about Roomba. But you're forgiven, because no one ever considered the possibility that a robotic vacuum cleaner -- and a cheap robotic vacuum cleaner at that -- would represent the very vanguard of the home robotics revolution.

Fifty years ago, if a futurist considered the possibility of a robot vacuum cleaner at all, it more resembled the Jetsons' Rosie than a foot-wide flattened disk: something like a human, which pushed a standard vacuum cleaner rather than being the cleaner itself. It took roboticists a while to get past the anthropomorphic robot idea, and Roomba is one of the results.

November 2008: Latest updates are in green.

On to part two:

• The Mysterious Origins of Roomba
  • Back to Roomba Guide Index