Alpha the Robot Meets Zorine, Queen of the Nudists
Posted by John Brownlee
Click the picture to see Alpha, Zorine and the Nudists in all their glory. Image originally from Big Red Hair (see comment below for origin)…
The year was 1935. In an effort to stave off the dismal economic slump that had made so many Depression-era San Diegans think of their city as a culturally stagnating dump, the San Diego City Council attempted to rally the spirits of its citizens by holding a massive exposition, which they hoped would boost tourism and jump start the faltering local economy.
The 1935 San Diego Exposition played host to hundreds of exhibits of historical, musical, artistic, scientific and industrial worth. And booking either end of the alphabetical list of attractions were the two headliners: Alpha the Robot and Zorine, Queen of the Nudists.
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| Alpha the Robot and Creator Harry May. Click to enlarge. |
Alpha the Robot was a “mechanical man” created by Harry May, displayed during the Exposition in the Palace of Science. Weighing over 2,000 pounds and towering over the pygmy Americans of yesteryear at an astonishing six feet and two inches, Alpha cold do an assortment of neat tricks. His most remarkable feat was the ability to fire a revolver with amazing mechanical precision. Alpha represented the cutting edge of mid-30’s robotic technology.
On the other side of the Exposition, in Balboa Park, Queen Zorine and her harem of g-stringed nudists frolicked, bounced and jiggled. They — sensuous noble savages — were as different from the metal man as could be. Surrounded by the crumbling ruins of Spanish Renaissance Architecture first constructed for the San Diego Exposition of 1915-1916, exposition patrons could pay money to watch the girls in their natural beauty: lounging around under incense bearing trees in a garden of sinuous rills, eating bananas suggestively, rubbing coconut oil all over their breasts and perhaps practicing French kissing on one another.
Who knows what emotions scraped the cogs off of Alpha’s mighty clockwork heart when his glowing electrode eyes first fell upon the buxom frame of Queen Zorine? How could he compute this strange human emotion? He may have compared it to the slight thrill of anticipation he felt right before he fired a bullet into a target, but amplified a million-fold; perhaps this was how he made sense of that all too human desire that shorted out his circuits, imagining Queen Zorine’s fertile loins as a target to be perforated with the explosive quicksilver projectiles of his robotic sperm. None of us can know what Alpha thought when he first succumbed to his lust… when he first decided to kidnap and ravage the voluptuous nudist. All we know for sure is that Alpha was not programmed to cope with animal lust.
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| Alpha Kidnaps Zorine, Queen of the Nudists. Click to enlarge. |
But Zorine’s desire for Alpha is perhaps more understandable. Between the clockwork man’s gleaming titanium legs she saw the mechanical pump that could slake her insatiable thirst for sensual gratification. The mountains of men that had piled on top of her had never once been able to subdue the tectonic rumble of her thighs. In Alpha, she saw the indefatigable lover that her own species could not provide.
Whatever the case, it was only days into the exposition before Alpha — maddened with sexual desire — broke out of the Palace of Science in search of the Nudist Queen. He found her in Balboa Park. There, he spent the day pleasing her and her constabulary of bronzed, buxom subjects. The photograph above was taken at the end of that day, and even though Alpha’s creator had never programmed him to feel joy, you can clearly see the curl of a smile somehow suffuse the sparkle-spitting slit of his oblong mechanical mouth. Alpha is the luckiest robot who ever lived.
[Most of the information on this page comes from The Journal of San Diego History’s article on the 1935 San Diego Exposition. You can find it here.]
Editor’s Note: Hello, Boing Boingers! Welcome to Ectomo, a fringe art and culture wunderkammer. We’ve just gotten started, and we’d love it if you stuck around, visited our homepage, even join our Twitter friends. Here’s some other posts we’ve done that you might enjoy:
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Categories: Sex, Technology, Robots, America
Posted at 12:54 pm on July 9, 2007
27 Comments -
Apologies for the futzed image at the bottom of this post, we just discovered a little bug in our template that only applies to long posts. We’ll fix.
Comment by John Brownlee — July 9, 2007 @ 2:35 pm
He’s lying, we’ll never fix anything!
Comment by Eliza Gauger — July 9, 2007 @ 5:52 pm
I’m surprised that such a thing was viewed as an attraction in the 1930s. Try those kind of shenanigans now and you’d be behind bars faster than you can say ‘erectile dysfunction’.
Comment by James — July 9, 2007 @ 9:29 pm
Now we know where R. Stevens gets his ideas from.
http://www.dieselsweeties.com/
Comment by Christian — July 10, 2007 @ 4:42 am
some robot, look, you can see there’s a man inside a mocked up suit of armour with a daft helmet on…
Comment by pc — July 10, 2007 @ 12:19 pm
How come the nudists of this century don’t look nearly as good as those?
Comment by zeron — July 10, 2007 @ 12:25 pm
Wow, money was so tight they couldn’t even afford clothes!
Comment by Joshua Gruber — July 10, 2007 @ 12:48 pm
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Pingback by robot of the day | Pie & Hammer — July 10, 2007 @ 1:32 pm
Why does the picture say 1930?
Timewarp?
Comment by Larry Welz — July 10, 2007 @ 2:52 pm
Robots and nudist win. But expos and fairs definitely made use of titillation and nudity.
The 1893 Colombian Expo introduced the world to belly dancing and a certain song about “the girls in France.”
The Internet Archive has great color home movies from the 1939 NYC World’s Fair, with footage of recreations of magazine covers with topless women, topless mermaids swimming about and scantily-clad women on fair ground itself.
And lastly, in preparation for the ‘39 Fair, NYC Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia mandated that all burlesque dancers cover up, thus necessitating the invention of the G-string.
Comment by Robert — July 10, 2007 @ 4:35 pm
The reason the photo says 1930 is because I deliberately mis-dated my retouched version of this image–like a scientist tags an animal–to see where it would migrate to.
I was lucky enough to get my hands on an original photo of this image at the Wyatt Earp Museum in San Diego. I posted it on my reto-robot site (Google “Victorian robots”) that features my robot BOILERPLATE. I removed the link to this image because of requests from secondary school teachers using my site for their classes.
I’m always happy to provide retro-robot images to websites, and only ask for credit and a link. Your welcome Ectomo.com, my lawyers will be in touch (joke). Enjoy!
Comment by Paul Guinan — July 10, 2007 @ 5:15 pm
Sorry about that, Paul… I didn’t realize the image was yours, it was sent to us in an email. Credited! And thanks for Boilerplate, one of the web’s more wonderful robots.
Comment by John Brownlee — July 10, 2007 @ 5:25 pm
Looks like you missed a vagina or two. :-P
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Pingback by All that is Weird, Wise and Wondrous on the web | Novatronic » links for 2007-07-11 — July 11, 2007 @ 8:27 am
why did you “censor” the picture??? because you are americans ;]
Comment by ingo la bousa — July 11, 2007 @ 8:49 am
No, because some of us view Ectomo from our work computers, and would like to continue receiving a regular pay check.
Comment by Peregrine — July 11, 2007 @ 11:03 am
That’s it in a nutshell. I’m not even in fucking America: it’s all a public service to facilitate work slacking and rake in the Google Ads!
Comment by John Brownlee — July 11, 2007 @ 11:11 am
to fudido
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