General Electric Hardiman

Joe, None exist that I've ever found. I had to dig down very deep to find even basic Popular Science-type magazine articles to get anything. You can try FindArticles.com to get some published material.

I live on the West coast myself, and I see you're based in Oz. But if you have an associate who can do the legwork, you might have that person visit the Schenectady Museum, which houses a number of GE archival material. I know that when I wrote and called GE's public relations office a few years ago inquiring about the Hardiman, no one responded other than with a "huh??"

The museum has online pages here:

Good luck. And please share what you find. The world has almost forgotten these important milestones in robotics. The "book" on Hardiman, Handyman, the 4-legged walking truck and other GE innovations of that period (not to mention Ralph Mosher and other GE engineers) has yet to be written -- you interested?

-- Gordon Author: Constructing Robot Bases (Forthcoming) Robot Builder's Sourcebook, Robot Builder's Bonanza

Well said, Gordon. But hey, are YOU interested?! :)

I used to have pictures of the Hardyman and the Walking Truck on my cubicle at Imagineering and always wondered what it would be to meet the men that constructed those machines.

My mentor from Canon, Bob Wadsworth, worked on the Apollo guidance system and has told me some great stories about that, back when RAM was measured in the hundreds of bytes and shared between different mission phases/overlays.

This was all before I was born, but I can't avoid being drawn to the allure of clever engineering that persevered in the 1950s and 60s.

Dan