Who invented the first industrial robot?

The story has the ingredients of every good robot story: Devol filed his "programmed article transfer" patent in 1954, met Engelberger at a cocktail party over a conversation about Isaac Asimov, and together they convinced General Motors to try the machine on the job nobody wanted: the die-casting pit at the Ewing, New Jersey plant, heat, fumes and red-hot parts. The first Unimate weighed over a ton and ran on magnetic drum memory.

The founding pattern still holds sixty years later: the robot didn't enter the factory for being intelligent but for accepting the work humans did grudgingly, exactly the argument that sells warehouse AMRs and kilometer-eating server robots today. And one calendar irony: the word robot was born in the theater in 1920, but the machine that turned it into a trade took forty more years to clock in.