This article is about the robots nicknamed "Elektro". For the music genre, see Industrial music#Electro-industrial / elektro.

Elektro is the nickname of eight robots built by Westinghouse in Mansfield, Ohio between 1937 and 1938. Seven feet tall, weighing 300 pounds, humanoid in appearance, it could walk, talk (using a 78-rpm record player), and move its head and arms. It was on exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair. It reappeared at that fair in 1940, with "Sparko", a robot dog that could bark, sit, and beg.

Elektro toured North America in 1950 in promotional appearances for Westinghouse, and was displayed at Palisades Park in Oceanside, California in the late fifties and early sixties. It also appeared as "Thinko", in a 1960 film, Sex Kittens Go to College, which starred Mamie Van Doren and Tuesday Weld.

Only one still exists. It was on exhibit in the fall of 2004 at the Mansfield Memorial Museum.

External links

• Robot is what the future used to look like, a February 2005 article from the Cleveland Plain Dealer
• Photo and document gallery from a former Westinghouse employee
• Amusing Elektro commentary