Rod Brooks, the great robotics pioneer and innovator, founded the company iRobot, which created the Roomba, thereby introducing household robotics into many homes. More recently, Brooks founded another company, Rethink Robotics, which introduced Baxter, a friendly low-cost general purpose robotic factory worker with some built-in common sense.
Somewhere Karel Capek is looking bemused, while Isaac Asimov is wondering whether he can still sue.
But where did the name “Baxter” come from? I have a theory.
In 1962 Hanna-Barbera first aired the cartoon “The Jetsons”. As many of you know, it was a vision of a future where family cars had been replaced by flying saucers, meals could be created at the touch of a button, and pretty much all of our techno-fantasies had come true. The joke was that nothing had really changed: Our hero, George Jetson, was just as much the put-upon every-man as his predecessor, Hanna-Barbera’s even more popular every-man Fred Flintstone.
One of the most popular characters on “The Jetsons” was the robotic maid Rosie, a working-class robot with an accent straight out of Brooklyn. The wise-cracking Rosie, who referred to her employer as “Mr. J”, never let George Jetson get the upper hand. While technically she worked for him, she always made sure her upwardly striving white-collar boss knew that she was several steps ahead of him.
Hanna-Barbera had a habit of riffing off and borrowing from whatever was popular in the contemporary culture. In this case the borrowing was from a very popular sitcom that had premiered the previous year. “Hazel” starred the brilliant Academy Award winning Shirley Booth. She played a working class maid (complete with Brooklyn accent) in an upper middle class household. Hazel was always several steps ahead of her employer, who she always referred to as “Mr. B”.
This was all when Rod Brooks was around fifteen years old, a very impressionable age for a young roboticist.
As it happened, Hazel’s upwardly striving white-collar boss also had the first name George.
And his last name was Baxter. You do the math.
Brooks grew up in Adelaide though didn’t he?
Australia had US tv shows much later than the US. The timing could well be off. But you never know.
Dr Who was shown early in Australia.
In Australia there was a similar robot character, Dexter, who was used on a dating show who looks vaguely like Baxter:
http://www.cv.vic.gov.au/stories/tv50-anniversary-of-television-in-australia/7148/dexter-the-robot/
However, this is unlikely to be the inspiration either as by the time the show was on in Australia Brooks was living in the US.
“Dexter” is a fine name.
And it might have made the spirit of Karel Capek very happy if a future robotic factory worker ended up with the same name as a sociopathic killer. 🙂