Fossil Words

 

[In paleontology, the study of the forms of life existing in prehistoric times, a fossil is any preserved evidence of ancient life, including shells, imprints, burrows, coprolites, and organically-produced chemicals.  This includes the mineralized (converted to a mineral; petrified) remains of an animal or plant.

[Fossil words are words that have largely fallen out of common use but still survive in idioms and set phrases.  Evan Porter, a professional writer with a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from Towson University (Towson, Maryland), explains how this happens:

Though English has technically existed for well over a thousand years, today’s modern version of the language is nearly unrecognizable from its roots in Old [mid-5th century (around 450 CE) to the late 11th century (around 1066 or 1150 CE)] and Middle English [1100/1150 to 1500].  Over time, words and phrases evolve and transform in both pronunciation and meaning.  New words are created, and many older words die out.

Some antiquated words, however, manage to survive the passage of time even if they're not regularly used in everyday conversation or writing.  How can they hold on without ever actually being used?  By being “fossilized.”

“A fossil word is a word that appears primarily in the context of a specific phrase.  Words can become fossilized either because they grow antiquated or because they're replaced by other words in common speech.  But the phrase in which they appear remains,” says author and etymologist Jess Zafarris in a TikTok video[.]

—“19 nearly-extinct 'fossil words' that only survive hidden inside these specific idioms,”

Upworthy, 10 December 2025

[Etymology, which is an important aspect of the formation and eventual fossilization of fossil words, is the study of the sources and development of words and their components.

[Readers of Rick On Theater may know that I’m both a wordie and a language geek.  (I even contributed a few times to William Safire’s [1929-2009] “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine [1979-2009].)  When I was working on the recent post on “Sign Museums,” and I was looking into the history of Moxie, the soft drink popular in New England, and the etymology of the noun ‘moxie’ that came from the drink’s name, I came across Jess Zafarris’s blog Useless Etymology, I found it attention-grabbing. 

[Oddly perhaps, I’d never heard of fossil words.  After reading Zafarris’s book excerpt on the subject, I decided to share it with ROTters.  So, first, here’s her brief discussion of fossil words, followed by a few additions from other sites I located on the ’Net.]

“ETYMOLOGICAL EXCAVATION: WHAT IS A FOSSIL WORD?”
by Jess Zafarris 

[Posted on Useless Etymology, Jess Zafarris’s blog, on 11 November 2025, this article is drawn from her 2025 book, Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds (Chambers, 2025), an exploration of unusual word histories.]

A fossil word is a word that primarily appears in the context of phrases or idioms. It typically comes attached to other words. The phrase survives even when the word itself becomes antiquated and rarely appears on its own.

Think about the phrase “to and fro.” “Fro” was a preposition and adverb meaning “away” or “backwards.” It almost never appears on its own, but “to and fro” remains in wide use.

Another example is the word “bated” in the phrase “bated breath.” It’s a past participle form of the word “abate” [to make or become less in amount, intensity, degree, etc.] but that form is not typically used in English unless it’s attached to the word “breath.”

Although the word “bide” can still be found independently in some English dialects [to mean ‘to endure,’ ‘stay,’ or ‘wait’], it’s heavily associated with the phrase “bide one’s time” in American English. It’s related to the words “abide” and “abode,” and both are from the Old English bidan, meaning “to stay, live, or remain.”

“Lam” is rare outside of the phrase “on the lam,” and its origin is a bit mysterious. In the Elizabethan era it was both a verb meaning “to beat,” and a noun meaning a heavy blow, so “on the lam” which was originally American crime slang, might imply the same thing as the term “beat it” does when it comes to running away. It’s also thought to be related to the word lambast. To “lambast,” which was originally pronounced and spelled “lambaste” (and still is in some cases, depending on your region) combines that lam verb, to “beat,” with a 17th century sense of the verb “baste,” which comes from Old Norse [spoken across Scandinavia and spread through Viking settlements, including the British Isles, from roughly the 8th to 13th centuries] and also means to thrash someone.

Both spic and span are fossilized in the phrase “spic” and “span.” A spic is a nail, and span is a word for a wood chip. The phrase refers to something that’s freshly cut by a workman’s hands, like a brand-new nail from a smith or perhaps like a fresh cutting from a lumberjack. Both of these are Germanic and probably from Old Norse. “Span new” is recorded as a variation on “brandnew” in the 1600s.

“The whole shebang” is another etymological mystery. We do know that Walt Whitman [1819-92] used the word “shebang” as a word for a shelter in his 1862 prose work “Specimen Days”:

“Besides the hospitals, I also go occasionally on long tours through the camps, talking with the men, &c. Sometimes at night among the groups around the fires, in their shebang enclosures of bushes.”

It may also be related to various words for taverns; in Irish, Scottish and South African dialects, a speakeasy or illicit tavern might be called a “shebeen.”

The “lo” in “lo and behold” is a generic Old English exclamation. It’s probably an imperative of the word “look” or in Old English loken. But you might also use it as a greeting, or if you’re surprised, or if you need to express joy or grief. Sounds like it’s all about tone of voice.

“Caboodle” is fossilized in the phrases “kit and caboodle” and “the whole caboodle.” The first of these phrases is predated by similar terms such as “kid and cargo” and “kit and boodle.” An earlier version of the phrase “the whole caboodle” was simply ”the whole boodle.” “Caboodle” and “boodle” both mean “collection,” with the ca- on caboodle probably operating as an intensifier, implying a really big boodle. Both are thought to be from the Dutch ter[m] boedel, meaning “property.” The “kit” in “kit and caboodle” is, of course, the modern word for any collection of items used to repair, maintain, or make another item, or all the clothes and equipment needed to perform a task or play a sport [this usage is common in British English]. It too is probably Dutch in origin, from the term kitte meaning a “wooden vessel” or a wooden ship. Hence “kit and caboodle” implies “the whole ship and its cargo.”

Sometimes fossil words are only semi-fossilized. The word “figment” can certainly be used independently to describe something invented, but it most often appears in the phrase “figment of your imagination.” The word “inclement” is rarely used outside of the phrase “inclement weather,” from the Latin [clemens, clementis], “mild, placid.” “Turpitude” rarely appears outside of the phrase “moral turpitude.”  This word is from the Latin turpis meaning vile, foul or ugly. So moral turpitude is utter depravity and vileness.

Another form of semi-fossilization: The word “dint” is a predecessor to the word “dent,” which remains in use as a word for a small indentation or defect. You may have read this word in historical or fictional accounts of people wearing armor; a small indentation in armor is often a dint rather than a dent. Similarly the little indentations in coconuts are often called dints instead of dents. But there’s also the idiom “by dint of,” meaning “by means of,” and in this context dint is fossilized because this is the only scenario in which “dint” has this definition. But both usages have the same origin: A dint (or in Old English, dynt) was a blow dealt in a battle, just like we see in the armor sense, so in the context of the phrase “by dint of” it suggests the force by which a blow or other action is carried out. So, you might receive a dint in your armor by dint of fighting in a battle. “Dent” came along later (early 14th c.) from the same etymological source as “dint,” but “dent” became the preferred spelling in the 15th century due to influence from Latin-derived words like indent and indentation.

Much ado about ado

Another fossil word worth a more detailed excavation is “ado.” Nowadays, it’s most often found in the phrases “without further ado” and “much ado about nothing,” which survived thanks to the name of the Shakespearean comedy. But did you know that the word “ado” is a contraction—and an infinitive?

As you probably know from your grade school grammar lessons, an infinitive is the base form of a verb, the form it takes when it’s not conjugated [to inflect (a verb) for each person, in order, for one or more tenses; to vary the form of (i.e., to inflect) a word to express tense, gender, number, mood, etc.]. In English, we pair unconjugated verbs with the word “to” to create the infinitive.  An infinitive phrase is something like “to walk,” “to go,” “to speak,” or “to do.” The word “to” usually acts as a preposition, but in infinitive phrases, it acts as what we call a particle [known as the sign of the infinitive]. This usage of the word “to” came around in Middle English as an adaptation of the word “to” in the Old English dative case.

[The dative case is the grammatical form for the indirect object of a sentence, the person or thing that receives the direct object or who benefits from the action. Modern English doesn’t have the dative case in the declensions (the inflection of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives); we use the objective case (the accusative case in languages such as Latin, German, and Russian) with a preposition such as ‘to’ or ‘for’ to form a prepositional phrase: I gave the letter to her; or I gave her the letter.

[(In the examples, the pronoun her and the prepositional phrase to her are the indirect objects; the direct object, the person or, in this instance, the thing acted upon, is the noun the letter. In German, the sentence would read: Ich gab ihr den Brief; the word ihr is the dative case of sie, the nominative or subjective case of the pronoun ‘she.’ The phrase den Brief is the direct object and is the accusative or objective case of der Brief.)]

But English also has some influence from Old Norse thanks to the Vikings. For an example of why this matters with the word “ado,” let’s take a look at Norwegian, which is a modern Nordic language. Norwegian infinitives are generally introduced by the particle å, which is cognate with the English word “at.”

So, if Middle English had had more influence from Old Norse, our modern infinitive particle could very well have ended up being “at” rather than “to.” So instead of “to speak” or “to walk,” we could have ended up having “at speak” and “at walk” as infinitives. And that’s exactly what’s happening with the word “ado,” which is a contraction of “at” and “do.”

So why does “ado” mean a commotion or a big deal? Well, you know how sometimes when there’s a lot of drama or commotion, or someone throws a big event, we sometimes say that it’s “a big to-do” or “a whole to-do”? Using this infinitive like this i[t] literally suggests that there is a lot to do or a lot that has to be done.

In the phrase “a big to-do,” the infinitive phrase “to-do” is cosplaying as a noun. “Ado” functions the same way, but it uses that Norse-influenced infinitive structure, with “at” in place of “to,” and then it’s contracted to “ado.” Ado is the older word, first recorded in Norse-influenced areas of northern England, and “to-do” arose later in the 16th century, taking over in a lot of contexts.

[Jess Zafarris’s Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds is available for purchase from various online (Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble) and physical retailers.  It provides an accessible deep dive into etymology for a general audience and covers topics like ‘astronaut’ meaning ‘star-sailor,’ ‘companion’ meaning ‘sharing bread,’ and the etymology of ‘trivia,’ making it an engaging read for word lovers.  

[Zafarris presents this with wit and whimsy, arguing that understanding word origins provides “superpowers” for language.  Reviewers praised it for debunking common myths and highlighting the global, cross-cultural influences on the English language. 

[Zafarris, a popular etymology content creator, is known for her TikTok posts (@jesszafarris) and blog (uselessetymology.com), where she shares similar content.]

*  *  *  *
EXAMPLES OF ENGLISH FOSSIL WORDS

champing

Phrase: champing at the bit (excited for something)

Definition: This is just a variation of “chomping.” Often, people will in fact say “chomping at the bit” instead, but this is considered an eggcorn, which is a language mistake often caused because someone has heard an idiom incorrectly.

vim

Phrase: vim and vigor (full of life)

Definition: Energy, excitement. But you’d never say someone is full of just “vim.”

kith

Phrase: kith and kin (friends and family)

Definition: a person’s friends, acquaintances and basically anyone you know who isn’t covered by “kin.” Kith has also found a second life as the name of a retail establishment.

[Established in 2011 in New York City, Kith (sometimes stylized as KITH) is a lifestyle brand and specialty retailer that offers seasonal collections of men’s, women’s, and children’s apparel, accessories, and footwear. It now has outlets all over New York, the U.S., and the world.]

loggerheads

Phrase: at loggerheads (in a heated, dead-locked dispute)

Definition: a foolish person. Today, the word only survives as the name of a certain breed of turtle, a certain breed of bird and a few locations in England. It’s not entirely clear how “at loggerheads” started referring to two people having a disagreement.

deserts

Phrase: just deserts (to get what one deserves)

Definition: what one deserves. Sometimes — but rarely — someone will refer to “deserts” without the “just,” yet they’re almost always a pairing. The fact that “deserts” (the comeuppance) is pronounced differently from “deserts” (the biome) leads many people to mistake it for “just desserts.”

wedlock

Phrase: out of wedlock (in a state of not being married)

Definition: in a state of being married. This word fell out of fashion because it’s simple enough to say that someone is married or not. But the euphemistic phrase “a child born out of wedlock” (which is still frowned upon in many parts of the world) has kept this word alive.

knell

Phrase: death knell (a sign of the end of something)

Definition: the sound of a funerary bell. Historically, people would literally ring a bell to alert the world that someone has died. Sometimes this was called a “passing bell” or a “death bell.” This isn’t a particularly common practice anymore, but it lives on in this idiom.

dudgeon

Phrase: in high dudgeon (enraged)

Definition: a state of indignation. No one seems to be in low dudgeon anymore, though.

hither

Phrase: hither and thither (all over the place), hither and yon (in disparate directions), come hither (come here, usually seductively)

Definition: toward this place. “Hither” is one of the rare fossil words that has survived in multiple different phrases. In most other contexts, “hither” is pretty easily replaced by “here,” which is similar but not the same. “Here” refers to an exact location, but “hither” refers to a direction toward an exact location.

petard

Phrase: hoist by their own petard (to be destroyed by your own weapon)

Definition: a small bomb. “Hoist” also isn’t particularly common, and it means “to be raised” (usually by pulleys, but sometimes by a petard). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the works of William Shakespeare are the source of a number of idioms that hold fossil words. The phrase “hoist with his own petard” was originally used in a speech in Hamlet (Act 3, scene 4).

[The original spelling of Shakespeare’s line was “hoist with his own petar” (no d).  This may have something to do with the etymology of the word, which is derived from the French word péter, which means ‘to fart.’ It’s a reference to the noise the small bomb makes when it explodes.]

ken

Phrase: beyond one’s ken (outside of one’s knowledge)

Definition: a person’s knowledge. While this word is not very common in English, you’ll find it in Scots as a verb meaning “to know.”

amok: from the Malay word amuk; often seen in the phrase “run amok,” ‘to run about with or as if with a frenzied desire to kill.’ Hard to be amok without running.

ruth: ‘pity’ or ‘compassion’; used in “ruthless,” meaning ‘lacking compassion.’

wreak: ‘to inflict or execute’ (punishment, vengeance, etc.); primarily used in “wreak havoc,” ‘to cause considerable confusion, disorder, or damage.’ Hard to wreak without havoc.

asunder: ‘into separate parts; in or into pieces’; as in “torn asunder,” meaning ‘to be pulled or ripped violently into separate pieces’

bandy: really two words: meaning 1: ‘to pass from one to another or back and forth’; ‘give and take’; ‘trade’; ‘exchange’ as in “bandy about”; meaning 2: from a Scots word, bandy, meaning ‘bowed’ or ‘curved outward,’ “bandy-legged” means ‘bowlegged’

beck: from Middle English bekken meaning ‘to signify’; ‘beckon,’ ‘beck’ means ‘a gesture used to signal, summon, or direct someone’ and appears in the expression “at one’s beck and call”; the verb form “beckon” is still common in non-idiom-specific use

betide: ‘to happen to’; ‘come to’; ‘befall’; as in “woe betide you/us/them”

eke: from Middle English eke (‘to add to,’ ‘augment’; ‘to increase’); used in “eke out,” meaning ‘to obtain with difficulty or effort’

fettle: as in “in fine fettle”; the verb, ‘to fettle,’ originally meant ‘to put things in order,’ ‘tidy up,’ ‘arrange,’ or ‘prepare,’ so to be in fine fettle means to be 'in excellent health, spirits, or condition,'  The original verb remains in specialized use in metal casting ('to remove sand from a casting'; 'to repair the hearth of an open-hearth furnace').

helter skelter: 'in a haphazard manner'; 'without regard for order,' as in “scattered helter-skelter about the office”; Middle English skelten, ‘to hasten’

madding: ‘’making mad’; ‘maddening’ as in “far from the madding crowd”

math: from Middle English, ‘a mowing’; ‘aftermath’: what comes after the mowing, usually of strongly negative connotation, implying a preceding catastrophe

scot: in Middle English, a local tax, originally paid to the lord or ruler and later to a sheriff; historically in Britain, “scot free” meant “exempt from royal tax or imposts.”  By extension, it later came to mean “without consequences or penalties” or “free without payment.”

sleight: an artful trick; sly artifice; a feat so dexterous that the manner of performance escapes observation; the phrase “sleight of hand” refers to the skill in feats requiring quick and clever movements of the hands, especially for entertainment or deception.

shrive: “To hear or receive a confession”; preserved only in inflected forms occurring only as part of fixed phrases: ‘shrift’ in “short shrift,” meaning “to give little and unsympathetic attention to,” and ‘shrove’ in “Shrove Tuesday,” the final day of Shrovetide, which marks the end of the pre-Lenten season; it’s observed in many Christian countries through participating in confession, the ritual burning of the previous year’s Holy Week palms, and finalizing one's Lenten sacrifice

wend: as in “wend your way,” meaning “to proceed on your way,” although its former past tense “went” is still in use as the past tense of “to go”

yore: “time long past,” as in “of yore,” usually (but not exclusively) “days of yore”

[To fill the list out, I added some fossil words from posts from Babbel. Reddit, and Wikipedia.

[I have several other posts on ROT that cover words and etymologies (e.g.: “Short Takes: Word Origins & Other Derivations” [4 July 2010]), as well numerous posts on writing.]

Sign Museums

 

[I suspect most people think of museums as either art collections like the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, or natural history repositories such as New York’s American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in D.C. 

[Of course, there are many specialized museums, including art collections devoted to single artists or specific kinds of art, displays of certain types of technology, and exhibits of national or regional history.  Some museums become well known and draw thousands or even hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.

[On the other hand, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of museums that aren’t so prominent, are off the tourist paths, and may even seem a little . . . well, odd.  Not far from where I live in Manhattan, for instance, are the National Museum of Mathematics and the Museum of Sex.  Seriously, they’re actual museums.

[In Washington, a city of well over 170 museums, galleries, and historic sites—one of the densest museum environments in the world—there’s the International Spy Museum and National Postal Museum; the Army Medical Museum used to be in the District but relocated to suburban Silver Spring, Maryland, and changed its name to the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

[There used to be the Bead Museum (yes, beads!; closed in 2008), the National Gallery of Caricature and Cartoon Art (closed in 1997; collections now at the Library of Congress), the National Museum of Crime & Punishment (closed in 2015), the National Pinball Museum (closed in 2011), and the Newseum (about journalism and dedicated to the First Amendment; closed in 2019; currently seeking new location).

[In New York City. with over 260 museums, there’s the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Museum of Illusions (Chelsea in Manhattan), the Museum of Ice Cream (SoHo in Manhattan), the Museum of Interesting Things (East Village in Manhattan), and the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum (Cypress Hills).

[Back until 1972, the Ripley's Believe It or Not! Odditorium was in Times Square (it had a two-headed goat!); a new Ripley space, the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Times Square, opened, but didn’t survive the pandemic and closed in 2021. The K.B.G. Espionage Museum in Manhattan’s Chelsea also didn’t make it after the pandemic, closing in 2020.

[Last week I learned that there are museums of signage.  Who knew?  I discovered that little factoid when I watched the evening news a few days ago and saw a report about the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio.

[The English word ‘sign’ has a several meanings.  For the purpose of this post, I’m going to restrict the use to a few specific senses, principally any kind of visual graphics created to display information to a particular audience.  This would customarily be a signboard, a device used to identify or advertise a product, event, premises, or property.

[Variations on this definition include information signs that present notices that instruct, advise, inform, or warn people; traffic signs that instruct drivers, such as stop signs, speed limit signs, cross walk signs, and so on; commercial signage, including flashing signs, such as on retail stores, factories, or theaters, and other establishments.

[Signs such as these are ubiquitous and have been around since the establishment of the written word, and even before that, with the information being communicated symbolically, like the three gold balls of the pawnbroker or the colored spiral of the barber pole.

[When I went to check out ASM, I found an earlier report from late last year about another collection of signs right here in New York City, the New York Sign Museum in Brooklyn.  I live in Manhattan, across the river from Brooklyn, and never even heard of it!

[So, here are the two reports on sign museums, just because I find their existence a curiosity.  See of you find them so, too.]

“NOSTALGIA AND NEON: SIGN MUSEUM IN BROOKLYN
WORKS TO PRESERVE NEW YORK HISTORY, STORIES”
by Joelle Garguilo 

[The earlier report on a sign museum, which I obviously hadn’t seen, aired on Eyewitness News on ABC 7 New York (WABC-TV, Channel 7 in New York City) on 29 October 2025.  (The transcript of the report includes a video clip.)]

NEW YORK (WABC) – If you’re looking for a good sign, this is it!

In a city like New York, history is all around us, even where you’d least expect it – like the thousands of signs you’ll pass while strolling down city streets.

The New York Sign Museum in Brooklyn is working to preserve the unseen history behind vintage signage.

The museum is home to more than 200 rescued signs, advertising everything from restaurants and bars to barber shops and tailors.

David Barnett and Mac Pohanka are on a mission to ensure these pieces of New York City history don’t end up in the trash.

“You sort of take things for granted, especially with New York City signage,” Barnett said. “The signs have stories to tell. They’re New York stories. That’s why I think it’s so important to save this stuff.”

Their passion led them to the building in East New York where Barnett and Pohanka began the museum.

“For us, there’s so much craft, there’s so many stories,” Barnett said.

“I mean, talk about a sign with stories. Right? Cops and, the mob bosses would have allegedly, would have, like, lunches there,” Barnett described the history of one restaurant sign.

The museum also offers tours where visitors can learn how vintage signs reflect the city that once was.

“This is the Starlite Deli sign from Times Square. This was like a local institution. An older couple came on the tour, and they came up and said, we’re the owners of Starlite Deli. They said, you know, it was it was so meaningful for them to see the sign here and to see it preserved,” Barnett said.

For Barnett, the work is rooted in a family tradition he didn’t even know existed until recently.

“My great-grandfather was a sign painter in New York,” Barnett said. “I think the signs represent New Yorkers and they represent that part of us. The signs have stories to tell, they’re New York stories. And, they are our stories to tell, so that’s why I think it’s so important to save this stuff, because when we lose that, we lose a part of who we are.

[The New York Sign Museum is located in East New York at 2465 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11207; its phone number is (646) 450-0621 and its e-mail address is nysignmuseum@gmail.com.

[Joelle Garguilo is an Emmy Award-winning entertainment reporter for WABC.  A native New Yorker, she began her career in broadcast television 15 years ago at NBC, interviewing hundreds of stars of the screen and stage including Oprah Winfrey, Tom Cruise, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Timothee Chalamet, Julia Roberts, Tony Bennett, Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, among others.

[Throughout her tenure, she held multiple roles across the network.  Most recently, she worked as an on-air entertainment and features reporter for New York Live correspondent for E! News while contributing at the Today Show with Hoda & Jenna.

[Garguilo’s talents have earned her two Emmy Awards, one for the magazine program New York Live: Home for the Holidays and a second for Outstanding Entertainment: Program Features/Segment for New York Live Features/Segments.]

*  *  *  *
“CINCINNATI MUSEUM CELEBRATES THE HISTORY
OF SMALL BUSINESSES THROUGH THEIR SIGNS”
by Tony Dokoupil 

[The CBS Evening News report on the American Sign Museum ran on 15 January 2026; I saw it on WCBS (Channel 2 in New York City).  It was part of Tony Dokoupil’s “Live from America Tour,” the new anchor’s two-week round of live broadcasts in, aside from Cincinnati, cities like Miami, Dallas, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Denver, Detroit, Chicago, and Pittsburgh.  (The report’s transcript is accompanied by a video.)]

Cincinnati — All his life, Tod Swormstedt has been fascinated, not necessarily by American small businesses, but by their signs, which announce to all the world — or at least the folks on Main Street — "we're here."

That interest prompted Swormstedt in 1999 to found the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati.

The museum is a collection of more than a century of entrepreneurship and ambition. A few of the businesses are still around, but the vast majority are not.

"To me, it's all about small business, the heart of America," Swormstedt told CBS News. 

The museum says it has more than 800 signs, 1,500 photographs, 175 pieces of artwork and 300 tools that celebrate American signage.  

It's a reminder of the moxie it has always taken to start something new, and the good fortune when it lasts.

[The slang word ‘moxie’ is curious, both in its meaning and its derivation. It’s almost archaic, seldom used today and largely regional in application, and thus no longer widely understood. It means ‘courageous spirit,’ ‘determination,’ or ‘perseverance,’ among other things. I have an idea why Tony Dokoupil chose it in this instance, but the explanation is too extensive for this space, so I’m going to postpone it until the afterword to this post.]

"The memory of the business is alive and well here through their signs," Swormstedt said.

Around one last corner, we found Tom Wartman and Bing Reising, professional benders — as the craft of neon sign-making is known — who created a new American sign for a classic American company, "CBS Evening News."

[The noun ‘moxie’ originated from Moxie Nerve Food, a patent medicine produced in Massachusetts around 1876 “that can recover brain and nervous exhaustion; loss of manhood, imbecility and helplessness” (Frederic G. Cassidy,“The Etymology of Moxie,” Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, No. 16 [1995], 208-211).

[The name of the tonic comes from a word that appears in Maine, where the drink’s creator was born, in lake and river names, such as Moxie Falls, and in the local name of a plant, the moxie-plum.  One proposed etymology for the word is an Abenaki word meaning ‘dark water’; Abenaki is an Algonquian language of Quebec and northern New England.  Another suggested origin is that it's an Algonquian root maski-, meaning ‘herbal infusion.’

[The tonic’s manufacturers added soda water to the concoction in 1885, transforming it into a carbonated beverage.  Later, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 banned unproven health claims, forcing the company to remove “Nerve Food” from its name and drop advertisements claiming it could cure ailments.

[By the 1920s, Moxie became the most popular soda in America.  During the Great Depression (1929-39), however, Moxie started to lose market share to Coca-Cola and other national soft drink brands and by the late 1940s, Moxie was largely a regional favorite in New England. 

[In 2005, Moxie was named the official state soft drink of Maine, and in 2018, the beverage was bought by Coca-Cola.  When I was a preteen, in the mid- and late ’50s, I went to summer camp in Maine, and I had my first taste of Moxie there--and my last!  I didn't like it at all—it tasted bitter and mediciny—and never tried it again.

[The American Sign Museum is in the Camp Washington neighborhood of Cincinnati at 1330 Monmouth Avenue.  The phone number is (513) 541-6366 and the e-mail address is info@americansignmuseum.org.

[Tony Dokoupil is the anchor of the new CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil.  He previously served as co-host of CBS Mornings and anchored The Uplift, a weekly series spotlighting positive and inspiring stories for CBS News 24/7.]

[I think Dokoupil chose to use the old-fashioned word ‘moxie’ for his report on ASM because the signage preserved there harks back to an earlier era, as does the word and, like the journalist observed of the businesses represented by the signs, ‘moxie’ is pretty much defunct.  The word belongs to the time when the businesses whose signs are on display were operating.]

Robots! (Part 2)

 

[Part 2 of “Robots!” is the final installment of this short series.  As I acknowledged in Part 1, I decided to post this transcript while I was watching 60 Minutes last week.  When Bill Whitaker, the correspondent, referenced the earlier robotics report from 28 March 2021, I decided to post both transcripts.

[As I usually do with multi-part posts, I recommend reading the foregoing parts in order before jumping in in medias res.  In this case, the introduction to Part 1 contains a very brief run-down on robots and the origin of the word, itself.  (If you don’t already know how the word was coined, you might be surprised.)]

“BOSTON DYNAMICS’ AI-POWERED HUMANOID ROBOT
IS LEARNING TO WORK IN A FACTORY”
by Bill Whitaker and Marc Lieberman

[Four years and nine months after airing the report in Part 1 of this series, CBS’s, 60 Minutes ran the segment below on 4 January 2026 (this link includes the video of the segment).  It was a follow-up to the Anderson Cooper report, this time with Whitaker as correspondent, and the news magazine broadcast revisited Boston Dynamics.

[In December 2020, Hyundai Motor Group, the Korean auto-maker, made a deal to buy 80% of Boston Dynamics, and in June 2021, just after the earlier 60 Minutes report at the end of March, Hyundai completed the agreement and officially took control of BD.  It’s unknown even now what this change of hands means in terms of BD’s robotics work, though the auto-maker has launched a new division to create “walking cars” and other robots.]

Will AI-powered humanoid robots someday work alongside us?

Bill Whitaker: For decades, engineers have been trying to create robots that look and act human. Now, rapid advances in artificial intelligence are taking humanoids from the lab to the factory floor. As fears grow that AI will displace workers, a global race is underway to develop human-like robots able to do human jobs. Competitors include Tesla, startups backed by Amazon and Nvidia, and state-supported Chinese companies. Boston Dynamics is a frontrunner. The Massachusetts company, valued at more than a billion dollars, is hard at work on a humanoid it calls Atlas. South Korean carmaker Hyundai holds an 88% stake in the robot maker. We were invited to see the first real-world test of Atlas at Hyundai’s new factory near Savannah, Georgia. There, we got a glimpse of a humanoid future that’s coming faster than you might think.

Voice-over (Bill Whitaker): Hyundai’s sprawling auto plant is about as cutting-edge as it gets. More than 1,000 robots work alongside almost 1,500 humans, hoisting, stamping and welding in robotic unison. This may look like the factory of the future, but we found the future of the future in the parts warehouse, tucked away in the back corner, getting ready for work. 

Meet Atlas: A 5'9", 200[-]pound, AI-powered humanoid created by Boston Dynamics. The rise of the robots is science fiction no more.

[Atlas, which was featured in the 2021 60 Minutes report covered in Part 1 of this series, was created in 2013. Boston Dynamics released YouTube videos of Atlas at different stages of its development in 2013 (the video in this link seems to be broken), 2016, 2017, May 2018, October 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 (x 2), 16 April 2024, and 17 April 2024.]

Bill Whitaker: I have to say, every time I see it, I just can’t believe what my eyes are seeing. Is this the first time Atlas has been out of the lab?

Zack Jackowski: This is the first time Atlas has been out of the lab doing real work.

Voice-over: Zack Jackowski heads Atlas development. He has two mechanical engineering degrees from MIT and a mission to turn the robot into a productive worker on the factory floor. We watched as Atlas practiced sorting roof racks for the assembly line without human help.

Bill Whitaker: So he’s working autonomously.

Zack Jackowski: Correct

Bill Whitaker: You’re down here to see how Atlas works in the field, and you’ll be showing Atlas off to your bosses at Hyundai?

Zack Jackowski: Yeah.

Yeah, a little bit. I– and I– I think a lot of our roboticists would’ve thought that was pretty crazy five, six years ago. 

Voice-over: When 60 Minutes last visited Boston Dynamics in 2021 [this is the report from 2021, posted as Part 1], Atlas was a bulky, hydraulic robot that could run and jump. Back then, Atlas relied on algorithms written by engineers. When we dropped in again this past fall, we saw a new generation Atlas with a sleek, all-electric body and an AI brain, powered by Nvidia’s advanced microchips, making Atlas smart enough to pull off hard to believe feats autonomously. We saw Atlas skip and run with ease.

Bill Whitaker: Do you ever stop thinking, gee whiz?

Scott Kuindersma: I remain extremely excited about where we are in the history of robotics but we see that there’s so much more that we can do, as well.

Voice-over: Scott Kuindersma is head of robotics research, a job he proudly wears on his sleeve.

Bill Whitaker: You even have on a robot shirt.

Scott Kuindersma: Well, once I saw that this shirt existed, there was no way I wasn’t buying it.

Voice-over: He told us robots today have learned to master moves that until recently were considered a step too far for a machine.

Scott Kuindersma: And a lot of this has to do with how we’re going about programming these robots now, where it’s more about teaching, and demonstrations, and machine learning than manual programming.

Bill Whitaker: So this humanoid, this mechanical human, can actually learn?

Scott Kuindersma: Yes. And– and we found that that’s actually one of the most effective way[s] to program robots like that.

Voice-over: Atlas learns in different ways. In supervised learning, machine learning scientist Kevin Bergamin – wearing a virtual reality headset – takes direct control of the humanoid, guiding its hands and arms, move-by-move through each task until Atlas gets it.

Scott Kuindersma: And if that teleoperator can perform the task that we want the robot to do, and do it multiple times, that generates data that we can use to train the robot’s AI models to then later do that task autonomously.

Voice-over: Kuindersma used me to demonstrate another way Atlas learns.

Scott Kuindersma: That v– very stylish suit that you’re wearing is actually gonna capture all of your body motion to train Atlas to try to mimic exactly your motions. And so you’re about to become a 200-pound metal robot.

Voice-over: He asked me to pick an exercise. They captured the way I work as well.

Bill Whitaker: I am here at the AI Lab at Boston Dynamics. All of my movements, my walking, my d– arm gestures are being picked up by these sensors . . .

Voice-over: Then engineers put my data into their machine learning process. Atlas’ body is different from mine, so they had to teach it to match my movements virtually – more than 4,000 digital Atlases trained for six hours in simulation.

Scott Kuindersma: And they’re all trying to do jumping jacks, just like you. And as you can see, they’re just starting to learn, so they’re not very good at it.

Voice-over: The simulation, he told us, added challenges for the avatars, like slippery floors, inclines, or stiff joints, and then homed in on what works best.

Scott Kuindersma: And it can eventually get to a state where we have many copies of Atlas doing really good jumping jacks.

Voice-over: They uploaded this new skill into the AI system that controls every Atlas robot. Once one is trained, they’re all trained.

Scott Kuindersma: So that’s what you look like when you’re exercising.

Bill Whitaker: Uh-huh.

Voice-over: And what I look like doing my job.

Bill Whitaker: I am here at the AI Lab at Boston Dynamics. All of my movements, my walking, my d– arm gestures are being picked up by these sensors …

Bill Whitaker: This is mind-blowing.

Voice-over: Through the same processes, Atlas was taught to crawl, do cartwheels. It didn’t fare as well with the duck walk.

Scott Kuindersma: Oh, that was fun. And then this happens.

Bill Whitaker: And then this happens.

Scott Kuindersma: We love when things like this happen, actually. Because it’s often an opportunity to understand something we didn’t know about the system.

Bill Whitaker: What are some of the limitations you see now?

Scott Kuindersma: Well, I’d- I would say that most things that a person does in their daily lives, Atlas or– other humanoids can’t really do that yet. I think we’re start–

Bill Whitaker: Like- like what?

Scott Kuindersma: Well, just putting on clothes in the morning, or pouring your cup of coffee and walking around the house with it.

Bill Whitaker: That’s too difficult for– for Atlas?

Scott Kuindersma: Yeah, I think there are no humanoids that do that nearly as well as a person would do that. But I think the thing that’s really exciting now is we see a pathway to get there.

Voice-over: A pathway provided by AI. What stands out in this Atlas is its brain. Nvidia chips – the ones that helped launch the AI revolution with ChatGPT – process the flood of collected data, moving this humanoid robot closer to something like common sense.

Scott Kuindersma: So the analogy might be if I was teaching a child how to do free throws in basketball, if I allow them to just explore and come up with their own solutions, sometimes they can come up with a solution that I didn’t anticipate. And that’s true for these systems as well.

Voice-over: Atlas can see its surroundings and is figuring out how the physical world works.

Scott Kuindersma: So that some day you can put a robot like this in a factory and just explain to it what would– you would like it to do, and it has enough knowledge about how the world works that it has a good chance of doing it.

Robert Playter: There’s a lot of excitement in the industry right now about the potential of building robots that are smart enough to really become general purpose.

Voice-over: Robert Playter, the CEO of Boston Dynamics, spearheaded the company’s humanoid development. He’s been building toward this moment for more than 30 years. The cornerstone was this robotic dog, Spot, introduced almost a decade ago. Spots are trained in heat, cold and varied terrain, and roam the halls of Boston Dynamics.

Robert Playter: So we have some cameras– thermal sensors, acoustic sensors. An array of sensors on its back that lets it collect data about the health of a factory.

Voice-over: Spots carry out quality control checks at Hyundai, making sure the cars have the right parts. They conduct security and industrial inspections at hundreds of sites around the world. What began with Spot has evolved into Atlas.

Robert Playter: So this robot is capable of superhuman motion, and so it’s gonna be able to exceed what we can do.

Bill Whitaker: So you are creating a robot that is meant to exceed the capabilities of humans.

Robert Playter: Why not, right? We– we would like things that could be stronger than us or tolerate more heat than us or definitely go into a dangerous place where we shouldn’t be going. So you really want superhuman capabilities.

Bill Whitaker: To a lotta people that sounds scary. You don’t foresee– a world of Terminators [an allusion to the title character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1984’s science fiction film The Terminator (Orion Pictures) and its sequels]?

Robert Playter: Absolutely not. I think if you saw how hard we have to work to get the robots to just do some of the straightforward tasks we want them to do, that would dispel that– that worry about sentience and rogue robots.

Voice-over: We wondered if people might have more immediate concerns. We saw workers doing a job at the Hyundai plant that Atlas is being trained to perform.

Bill Whitaker: I guarantee you there are going to be people who will say, “I’m gonna lose my job to a robot.”

Robert Playter: Work does change. So the really repetitive, really back-breaking labor is really- is gonna end up being done by robots. But these robots are not so autonomous that they don’t need to be managed. They need to be built. They need to be trained. They need to be serviced.

Voice-over: Playter told us it could be several years before Atlas joins the Hyundai workforce fulltime. Goldman Sachs predicts the market for humanoids will reach $38 billion within the decade. Boston Dynamics and other U.S. robot makers are fighting to come out on top. But they’re not the only ones in the ring. Chinese companies are proving to be formidable challengers. They’re running to win.

Bill Whitaker: Are they outpacing us?

Robert Playter: The Chinese government has a mission to win the robotics race. Technically I believe we remain– in the lead. But there’s a real threat there that, simply through the scale of investment– we could fall behind.

Voice-over: To stay ahead, Hyundai made that big investment in Boston Dynamics.

Zack Jackowski: Four robots . . .

Voice-over: We were at the Georgia plant when Atlas engineer Zack Jackowski presented Atlas to Heung-soo Kim, Hyundai’s head of global strategy. He came all the way from South Korea to check in on the brave new world the carmaker is funding.

Bill Whitaker: What do you think of the progress that they’ve made with Atlas?

Heung-soo Kim: I think we are on track– about the development. Atlas, so far, it’s very successful. It’s a kind of– a start of great journey. Yeah.

Voice-over: The destination? That humanoid future we mentioned at the start – robots like us, working beside us, walking among us. It’s enough to make your head spin.

[Bill Whitaker is an award-winning journalist and 60 Minutes correspondent who has covered major news stories, domestically and across the globe, for more than four decades with CBS News.

[Marc Lieberman joined 60 Minutes in 2014.  Working with correspondent Bill Whitaker, he has produced more than 40 stories, including breaking news, newsmaker interviews, profiles, and in-depth investigations.  He started his career at CBS News in 1992.]

Robots! (Part 1)

 

[A robot—as if anyone today doesn’t already know—is a machine that resembles a human and does mechanical, routine tasks on command.  That’s the meaning in the world of sci-fi; in the real-life industrial world, it’s a machine built and programmed to carry out some complex task or group of tasks by physically moving. 

[Lately, these two definitions are coming closer and closer together (as you’ll read in the reports in this post and the second one coming up in Part 2).

[While a robot may be constructed to suggest human form without mimicking human appearance and behavior, like the arguably best-known anthropomorphic robot, C-3PO from Star Wars.  (3PO’s companion, R2-D2, is a non-humanoid robot, resembling a moving trash can.) 

[A robot that’s designed to look and act like a human being is called an android, sometimes a ’droid for short.  Probably the most famous ’droid is Lieutenant Commander Data from the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation (Paramount Television, 1987-94; syndicated) and the subsequent films.

[A being that’s part machine and part organic is a cyborg, a kind of hybrid of a human and a robot.  This, of course, is a largely fictional creature—at least for the present. 

[The word ‘robot’ was first used in Karel Čapek’s (Czech; 1890-1938) 1920 play R.U.R.  The abbreviation in the title stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots (in Czech, Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti.)  In Czech, robota means forced labor.  The word, itself, was coined by the playwright’s brother. Josef (1887-1945), a Czech artist best known as a painter, but who was also a noted writer and a poet, who suggested it to Karel.

[‘Android,’ for the curious reader, is an amalgam of the ancient Greek andros (ανδρος), ‘man’ or ‘human,’ and eidos (ειδος), ‘form,’ ‘image,’ ‘shape,’ ‘appearance,’ or ‘look.’  It dates back, surprisingly, to the 1700s.  ‘Cyborg,’ coined in 1960, is a portmanteau word made up of syllables taken from ‘cybernetic’ (of or relating to the study of communication and control in living organisms or machines [i.e., cybernetics]) and ‘organism.’

[Humans have been fascinated with the idea of artificial life forms for almost as long as we’ve been writing down our thoughts, dreams, and fears.  The earliest treatment of man-made creatures was in Homeric Greece.  Around 700 to 600 BCE, the idea of robots appears in the Iliad when the god of fire, Hephaestus, forged armor for Achilles with the help of “golden maidens” who could talk, move, and reason, and were taught by the gods to make things with their hands.

[The Bible, in the Book of Revelation (Chapter 13), commonly dated to about 95 CE, describes a man-made object that is supernaturalized to act as a living creature and is granted “breath,” thus becoming capable of speaking.

[In Jewish folklore, a golem is an animated humanoid creature created entirely from inanimate matter—most commonly clay or mud—and brought to life through mystical rituals.  Though the word appears in the Bible and in early Talmudic texts, the golem as an animated clay statue created to protect Jews was a largely Ashkenazi (Jews of Eastern and Central Europe) figure.

[Abba ben Joseph bar Ḥama (ca. 280-352 CE), a Babylonian rabbi who’s referred to in the Talmud by the name Rava, was believed to have once created a golem.  The best-known stories about golems date to the 16th and 17th centuries in Poland and Bohemia.

[There’s a long history of discoveries of artificial creatures, going back as far as Egyptian dancing dwarves from about 2000 BCE animated via a system of gut strings and rollers and Archytas of Tarentum’s (Greek; 435/410-360/350 BCE) wooden bird powered by a jet of steam or compressed air (ca. 400-350 BCE), often cited as the first documented scientific “robot.”

[Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) designed the first documented physical humanoid robot (ca. 1495), a knight in metal armor.  Reconstructions from his notebooks show a system of pulleys and gears that allowed it to sit, stand, and move its visor.

[In 1739, Jacques de Vaucanson (French; 1709-82) devised one of the most famous early functional automatons: a gilded copper bird that could flap its wings and simulate eating and digesting grain.

[Eric (1928), one of the first modern humanoid robots made of metal, was an aluminum suit of armor built by British engineer William Henry (W. H.) Richards (1868-1948).  He could move his arms and head and was controlled by remote or voice.  In 1939, Elektro, a seven-foot-tall robot with a steel skeleton covered in an aluminum skin, was built by engineers at the Westinghouse Electric Corporation and displayed at the New York World’s Fair.  It could walk, talk via a record player, and even “smoke” cigarettes.  Both Eric and Elektro were officially labeled “robots,” Čapek’s play having been produced around the world, popularizing the word.

[My own first memorable encounter with the notion of robots was probably the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still (Twentieth Century Fox) in which Michael Rennie’s intergalactic ambassador, Klaatu, has a powerful robot, the “Iron Man,” named Gort.  The film’s my favorite science fiction flick—for two reasons.  One, it’s a terrific movie—a good plot, well told and well acted (with one of our best actresses in Patricia Neal, plus a favorite of mine, Sam Jaffe)—and, two, it was set and filmed in Washington, D.C., the town where I was born (though I was only 4 when it was being made there).]

“BOSTON DYNAMICS: INSIDE THE WORKSHOP
WHERE ROBOTS OF THE FUTURE ARE BEING BUILT”
by Anderson Cooper 

[This report from the 60 Minutes episode of 28 March 2021 (CBS News) was on a rare look behind the curtain of the robotics labs of Boston Dynamics.  The segment bore the on-air headline, “The Next Generation of Robots.”  Over four-and-a-half years later, 60 Minutes revisited and updated this subject.  That report will follow on Monday, 12 January.

[There’s no full video of this broadcast on line except for subscribers to Paramount+; readers who are subscribers or who wish to become one can log on from the page with this report.  On YouTube, there’s a short excerpt from near the beginning that’s less than a minute long and a five-minute video of a “60 Minutes Overtime” segment.  (There’s a link to Paramount+ on this site as well.)]

Boston Dynamics is a cutting-edge robotics company that’s spent decades behind closed doors making robots that move in ways we’ve only seen in science fiction films. They occasionally release videos on YouTube of their life-like machines spinning, somersaulting or sprinting, which are greeted with fascination and fear. We’ve been trying, without any luck, to get into Boston Dynamics’ workshop for years, and a few weeks ago they finally agreed to let us in. After working out strict COVID protocols, we went to Massachusetts to see how they make robots do the unimaginable.

From the outside, Boston Dynamics headquarters looks pretty normal. Inside, however. it’s anything but. If Willy Wonka made robots, his workshop might look something like this. There are robots in corridors, offices and kennels. They trot and dance and whirl and the 200-or-so human roboticists, who build and often break them, barely bat an eye.

That is Atlas, the most human-looking robot they’ve ever made.

It’s nearly 5 feet tall, 175 pounds, and is programmed to run, leap and spin like an automated acrobat.

Marc Raibert, the founder and chairman of Boston Dynamics doesn’t like to play favorites, but definitely has a soft spot for Atlas.

Marc Raibert: So here’s a little bit of a jump.

Anderson Cooper: I mean, that’s incredible. (LAUGH)

Atlas isn’t doing all this on its own. Technician Bryan Hollingsworth is steering it with this remote control. But the robot’s software allows it to make other key decisions autonomously.

Marc Raibert: So really the robot is–

Anderson Cooper: That’s incredible–

Marc Raibert: You know, doing all its own balance, all its own control. Bryan’s just steering it, telling it what speed and direction. Its computers are– adjusting how the legs are placed and what forces it’s applying–

Marc Raibert: In order to keep it– balanced.

Atlas balances with the help of sensors, as well as a gyroscope and three on-board computers. It was definitely built to be pushed around.

Marc Raibert: Good, push it a little bit more. It’s just trying to keep its balance. Just like you will, if I push you. And you can push it in any direction, you can push it from the side. (LAUGH)

Making machines that can stay upright on their own and move through the world with the ease of an animal or human has been an obsession of Marc Raiberts’ for 40 years.

[On 10 November 2025, Russia’s first AI-powered humanoid robot, officially called AIDOL (occasionally, but unofficially, AIdol), failed a fundamental task during its official unveiling. (The robot’s name is pronounced exactly like the English word ‘idol.’) As the robot was led onto the stage in Moscow to the theme song from Rocky, it managed a small wave before losing its balance and falling face-first onto the stage floor. Vladimir Vitukhin, CEO of Artificial Intelligence Dynamic Organism Lab (note the initials), the developing tech company, attributed the failure to a calibration error in the robot’s balance algorithms or insufficient lighting affecting its sensors.

[For curious ROTters who read Russian, the standard form of the robot’s name used by Russian news agencies and tech journals is “Айдол” (also pronounced like ‘idol’), written with a capital А at the beginning and continuing in lowercase (note the ‘short I’/I kratkoye). “АЙДОЛ” (all upper case), while technically an equivalent to the all-caps romanization “AIDOL,” is rarely used in Russian text and mostly appears only in headlines, logos, or as a stylized design choice. (Because the specific capitalization of “AIdol,” used by some English-language publications, is intended to highlight the English abbreviation and colloquialism for “Artificial Intelligence” (AI), it has no Cyrillic equivalent.)

[The robot’s English name, AIDOL, is an acronym for the name of the company that created it, Artificial Intelligence Dynamic Organism Lab. The company’s name in Russian is Лаборатория Динамических Организмов с Искусственным Интеллектом (literally, ‘Laboratory of Dynamic Organisms with Artificial Intelligence’). The Russian term for ‘artificial intelligence’ is искусственный интеллект (‘iskusstvennyi intellekt’; искусство/‘iskusstvo’ is Russian for ‘art’).]

Anderson Cooper: The space of time you’ve been working in is nothing compared to the time it’s taken for animals and humans to develop.

Marc Raibert: Some people look at me and say, “Oh, Raibert, you’ve been stuck on this problem for 40 years.” Animals are amazingly good, and people, at– at what they do. You know, we’re so agile. We’re so versatile. We really haven’t achieved what humans can do yet. But I think– I think we can.

Raibert isn’t making it easy for himself, he’s given most of his robots legs.

Anderson Cooper: Why focus on, on legs? I would think wheels would be easier.

Marc Raibert: Yeah, wheels and tracks are great if you have a prepared surface like a road or even a dirt road. But people and animals can go anywhere on earth– using their legs. And, so, that, you know, that was the inspiration.

Some of the first contraptions he built in the early 1980s bounced around on what looked like pogo sticks. They appeared in this documentary when Raibert was a pioneering professor of robotics and computer science at Carnegie Mellon. He founded Boston Dynamics in 1992, and with CEO Robert Playter has been working for decades to perfect how robots move.

They developed this robot, called Big Dog, for the military as well as a larger pack mule that could carry 400 pounds on its back. Experimenting with speed, they got this cheetah-like robot to run nearly 30 miles an hour.

None of these made it out of the prototype phase. But they did lead to this. It’s called Spot. Boston Dynamics made it not knowing exactly how it would be used.

But the inspiration for it isn’t hard to figure out.

Hannah Rossi: So Spot is a[n] omni-directional robot. So I can go forwards and backwards.

Anderson Cooper: This is crazy. (LAUGH)

Robert Playter: This is the real benefit of legs. Legs give you that capability.

That’s Robert Playter, the CEO, and Hannah Rossi, a technician who works on Spot.

Hannah Rossi: I’m not doing anything special to let it walk over those rocks. There you go.

The controls are easier to use than you might expect.

Anderson Cooper: Does it have to come in, straight on?

Hannah Rossi: You don’t have to be perfect about it drive it close to wherever you want to go and the robot will do the rest.

Anderson Cooper: Wow. In some ways it’s like driving a very sophisticated remote[-]control car. What makes it different?

Robert Playter: Spot is really smart about its own locomotion. It deals with all the details about how to place my feet, what gait to use, how to manage my body so that all you have to tell it is the direction they go to.

And in some cases, you don’t even have to do that. When signaled, Spot can take itself off its charging station and go for a walk on its own – as long as it’s pre-programmed with the route.

It uses five 3D cameras to map its surroundings and avoid obstacles.

Atlas has a similar technology, while we were talking in front of Atlas, this is how it saw us. 

Marc Raibert: This is inside Atlas’s brain. And it shows its perception system. So, what looks like a flashlight is really the data that’s coming back from its cameras. And it– you see the white– rectangles, that means it’s identifying a place that it could step. And then once it identifies it, it attaches those footsteps to it, and it says, “Okay, I’m gonna try and step there.” And then it adjusts its mechanics so that it actually hits those places when it’s– running.

All of that happens in a matter of milliseconds.

Marc Raibert: And so it’s gonna use that vision to adjust itself as it goes running over these blocks.

Atlas cost tens of millions of dollars to develop, but it’s not for sale. It’s used purely for research and development.

But Spot is on the market. More than 400 are out in the world. They sell for about $75,000 a piece, accessories cost extra. Some [S]pots work at utility companies using mounted cameras to check on equipment. Others monitor construction sites and several police departments are trying them out to assist with investigations.

Anderson Cooper: Let’s talk about the– the fear factor, When you post a video of Atlas or Spot doing something, a ton of people are amazed by it and think it’s great. And there’s a lot of people who think this is terrifying.

Robert Playter: The rogue robot story is a powerful story. And it’s been told for 100 years. But it’s fiction. Robots don’t have agency. They don’t make up their own minds about what their tasks are. They operate within a narrow bound [sic] of their programming.

Anderson Cooper: It is easy to project human qualities onto these machines.

Robert Playter: I think people do attribute to our robots much more than they should. Because you know, they haven’t seen machines move like this before. And so they– they want to project intelligence and emotion onto that in ways that are fiction.

In other words, these robots still have a long way to go.

Anderson Cooper: I mean, it’s not C[-]3PO. It– it’s not– a thinking–

Marc Raibert: Yeah. So let me tell you–

Anderson Cooper: Okay.

Marc Raibert: About that. There’s a cognitive intelligence and an athletic intelligence. You know, cognitive intelligence is making plans, making decisions– reasoning, and things like that.

Anderson Cooper: It’s not doing that?

Marc Raibert: It’s mostly doing athletic intelligence–

Anderson Cooper: Okay–

Marc Raibert: Which is managing its body, its posture, its energetics. If you told it to travel in a circle in the room it can go through the sequence of steps. But if you ask it to– go find me a soda, it’s– it’s not doing anything like that.

Just picking an item off the floor can sometimes be a struggle for Spot. Enabling it to open a door has taken years of programming and practice and a human has to tell it where the hinges are. 

Kevin Blankespoor: Each time we add some new capability– and we feel like we’ve got it to a decent point, that’s when you push it to failure to figure out, you know, how good of a job you’ve really done.

Kevin Blankespoor is one of the lead engineers here, but at times, he prefers a very low-tech approach to testing robots.

Anderson Cooper: You’re pretty tough on robots.

Kevin Blankespoor: We think of that as– as just another way to push them out of the comfort zone.

Failure is a big part of the process. When trying something new, robots, like humans, don’t get it right every time. There might be dozens of crashes for every one success.

Anderson Cooper: How often do you break a robot? (LAUGH)

Marc Raibert: We break them all the time. I mean, it’s part of our culture. We have a motto, “Build it, break it, fix it.”

To do that, Boston Dynamics has recruited roboticists with diverse backgrounds – there’s plenty of Ph.D’s, but also bike builders, and race car mechanics. Bill Washburn is part of that pit crew.

Anderson Cooper: They all look pretty dinged up.

Bill Washburn: Yeah.

Anderson Cooper: How often do these need to get repaired?

Bill Washburn: The biggest– kinda failures for me are, like, the bottom part of the robot breaks off of the top part of the robot. (CHUCKLE) And it’s like–

Anderson Cooper: That seems like a big– big failure. (CHUCKLE)

Bill Washburn: And the hydraulic hoses are the only thing holding it together.

Recently, Raibert and his team decided to push their robots in a way they never had before.

Marc Raibert: We spent at least six months, maybe eight, just preparing for what we were gonna do. And then we started to get the technical teams working on the behavior.

The behavior was dancing. All their robots got in on the act. The movements were cutting edge, but the music and the Mashed Potato were definitely old[-]school.

Anderson Cooper: There are some people who see that and say, “That can’t be real.”

Marc Raibert: Nothing’s more gratifying than hearing that.

Anderson Cooper: What’s the point in proving that the robot can do the Mashed Potato [popular dance craze of 1962, made famous by James Brown]?

Marc Raibert: This process of, you know, doing new things with the robots lets you generate new tools, new approaches, new understanding of the problem– that takes you forward. But, man, isn’t it just fun?

Anderson Cooper: But, I mean, it’s– it costs a lotta money. It took 18 months of your time.

Marc Raibert: I think it was worth it. (LAUGHTER)

Whether it’ll be worth it to Boston Dynamics’ new owners is less clear.

The South Korean carmaker, Hyundai, has agreed to buy a majority stake for more than a billion dollars. It’ll be Boston Dynamics’ third owner in eight years. There’s pressure to turn their research into revenue.

And Boston Dynamics hopes this new robot will help. It’s called Stretch and it’s due to go on sale next year. This is the first time they’ve shown it publically [sic].

Kevin Blankespoor: Warehouses is really the next frontier for robotics.

Stretch may not be that exciting to look at, but it’s built with a definite purpose in mind.  It’s got a seven-foot arm and they say it can move 800 boxes an hour in a warehouse and work for up to 16 hours without a break. Unlike many industrial robots that sit in one place, stretch is designed to move around.

Kevin Blankespoor: You can drive it around with a joystick. And at times, that’s the easiest way to get it set up. But once it’s ready to go in a truck and unload it, you hit go and from there on it’s autonomous. And it’ll keep finding boxes and moving ’em until it’s all the way through.

Robert Playter: This generation of robots is gonna be different. They’re gonna work amongst us. They’re gonna work next to us– in ways where we help them but they also take some of the burden from us.

Anderson Cooper: The more robots are integrated into the workforce, the more jobs would be taken away.

Robert Playter: At the same time, you’re creating a new industry. We envision a job– we– we– we like to call the robot wrangler. He’ll launch and manage five to 10 robots at a time and sort of– keep them all working.

Anderson Cooper: Is there a robot you’ve always dreamt of making (LAUGH) that you haven’t been able to do yet?

Marc Raibert: A car with an active suspension essentially legs like w– like a roller[-]skating robot. And a robot like that, you know, could go anywhere on earth. That’s one thing that maybe we’ll do at some point. But, you know, really, the sky’s the limit. There’s– there’s all kinds of things we can and will do.

As with so many things Boston Dynamics does. It’s hard to imagine how that would work, but then again, who’d have thought a bunch of metal machines would one day show us all how to do the Mashed Potato.

[Anderson Cooper, anchor of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, has contributed to 60 Minutes since 2006.  His exceptional reporting on big news events has earned Cooper a reputation as one of television’s preeminent newsmen.

[I decided to post this report after I watched the one coming up next earlier this month.  I was attracted to the upcoming 60 Minutes segment just because it fascinated me, and I considered reposting it while I was watching.  As you’ll see, Bill Whitaker, the correspondent on Part 2, makes reference to this report—which I saw back in 2021 and was remembering it as I took in Whitaker’s report—so I decided to repost both reports.  As I said: just because the topic intrigued me.

[I hope ROTters will find this interesting, too, and will return on Monday, the 12th, foe the second part of this short series.]