The Best of Sci-Fi-5

SIERRA SAM by Ralph Dighton from Associated Press

Some years back I got tired of that aching feeling in my head, and resolved never again to pit an opinion of mine against one of John Campbell’s—his are so much stronger.

By now, the habit of responding to Campbellian emphasis only with a) questions, or b) facts, is so ingrained that, lacking a really good question-story …

MAN-LIKE DEVICES USED

IN U. S. TESTS

THEY FEEL HEAT AND COLD, SENSE SHOCK

AND EVEN BREATHE AND BLEED

[Headlines from The New York Times, Jan. 10, 1960.]

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 9 (AP)—The age of the robot is closer than you think.

Synthetic men that can feel heat and cold, sense shock in a way that is equivalent to pain, even bleed and breathe, are in use every day as stand-ins for humans in dangerous experiments.

They are anthropomorphic; that is, they have the shape of men. They are anthropometric, or weighted like men, with a man’s center of gravity.

And they can be made to talk and walk like men whenever the need arises.

They can be bought for $1,500 up, depending on instrumentation.

The $1,500 model can’t do much. He’s the rugged, stupid type that gets thrown out of airplanes to test parachutes.

A $5,000 model rides on rocket sleds and centrifuges, pre-testing the forces of gravity and velocity that man will meet in space travel.

What would a walkie-talkie model cost?

“That’s hard to say. We haven’t made one yet,” says Harry Daulton, President of Sierra Engineering Company in suburban Sierra Madre, the country’s largest manufacturer of the robots.

“But I know we could make one,” he says. “Two producers have asked us about them for science-fiction movies and our engineers said it could be done.”

Daulton’s top seller is Sierra Sam, a six-foot, 200-pounder made of vinyl-dipped foam Latex, with bones and joints of steel and aluminum.

Sam’s midwife and physician is John Meyers, a former truck driver. “He can take 100 G’s,” Mr. Meyers said with pride.

That’s 100 times the force of gravity, or five times as much as a strong-man can take.

Mr. Meyers has made more than 200 Sams, and repaired most of them. Some have come back six or seven times from Air Force tests with their heads torn off, their backs and limbs broken, their bodies slashed, smashed, burnt and bent.

Mr. Meyers simply whips up a batch of foam Latex, pours it from mixer into mold and cures it in an electric oven. After dipping in vinyl, the new torso, head or limb is bolted into place.

The Air Force recently ordered a five-foot-six-inch dummy that may take a ride into space in a Project Mercury capsule one day.

The first Sam was built in 1949. As a maker of prosthetic devices-—artificial arms and legs—Sierra Engineering saw the need for an instrumented human-like shape for rocket-sled speed tests.

The company fabricated a dummy and sold it to the Air Force, where it was promptly dubbed “Sierra Sam,” a name that the company has copyrighted.

Since then Sams have parachuted from planes, tested ejection seats, whirled in centrifuges and crashed in hundreds of cars. They have figuratively saved thousands of lives by improving the safety design of vehicles that man rides in.

Now Sam has been instrumented with electronic devices that sense heat, cold, gravity forces, shock and wind velocity. Other devices closely duplicate human breathing apparatus for determination of what would happen to a man under such stresses.