Correspondent Christopher Redman's first encounter with a robot came late last summer at Ford's Wayne assembly plant just outside Detroit. "The thing looked like a demented turkey, but it wielded a welding gun with deadly efficiency and made a tremendous impression on me," says Redman. "I later found that the sparks from the welding gun had made a tremendous impression on my clothes as well." That confrontation helped spark this week's cover story on the robot revolution. "I became fascinated with them," says Redman. "Not just with the way they worked, but with what they can do for industry and society. Robots really are in a position to rewrite the rules of mass production, and that could change all our lives profoundly."

For this week's story Redman interviewed robot entrepreneurs, consultants and engineers, as well as managers and workers at Detroit auto companies, the nation's major robot users. "People kept asking me if I thought that robots would ultimately cause more problems than they solved," he says. "I have no ready answer to that, but I have learned that, despite the wonders they can work, they are incredibly stupid and remarkably inept compared to humans."

Senior Writer Otto Friedrich's fascination with robots began in his youth, when he first became acquainted with science-fiction writers such as H.G. Wells and Mary Shelley. Friedrich, who wrote the cover story and an accompanying box on the popular image of robots through the ages, admits that Shelley's Frankenstein has always had a special hold on his imagination. Says Friedrich: "It was one of my favorite books when I read it in high school. For me, Frankenstein's monster was the ultimate robot."

Reporter-Researcher Anne Hopkins says that her own image of robots has changed dramatically. "I started out with the misconception that they were things with bunking headlight eyes," says Hopkins.

Then she went to a Westinghouse plant in Bloomfield, N.J., and the Faichney thermometer factory, owned by Chesebrough-Pond, Inc., in Watertown, N.Y., to get a close look at the real things. In Watertown, Hopkins watched a shiny, beige Unimate Mark II robot perform a number of "unexpected and puzzling tasks" done previously by humans. "Now I realize that robots are not at all human-like but are still very impressive, even awesome in their own way," says Hopkins. Concludes Redman: "I am reassured by the fact that it will be many years before robots can replace journalists." He did not suggest how many.

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