Engineering Feats of Yesteryear

Relatively recently, I was perusing the online version of Popular Science and came across this old Popular Science article which details information about a massive "robot" (more what we would now call a "mech") called the Beetle, which was intended to be used to handle nuclear accidents.

(Photo cropped from some site that had "borrowed" it from somewhere else still.) The interesting thing about the Beetle is that it was designed to fulfill a role that my ancient kid's version Encyclopedia Brittanica predicted robots would serve in the future.

The other major prediction? I seem to recall that it depicted kids playing baseball with their (superhumanly powerful) robot buddies.

So that's zero for two, I guess. (The Beetle, while it still holds the honor of biggest "robot" ever built, never actually fulfilled its job, and its predicted more compact successors were never built. I imagine that if there were attempts at building a robot to fulfill the job in the future, it would be a Mobot [that's zero for three] telepresence robot.)

-Signing off.