George C. Devol | Inventor, 99

George C. Devol, 99, a largely self-taught inventor who helped develop Unimate, the revolutionary mechanical arm that became a prototype for robots now widely used on automobile assembly lines, died Thursday at his home in Wilton, Conn.

In the early 1950s, Mr. Devol built on his own work in electrical engineering and machine controls to design a mechanical arm that could be programmed to repeat precise tasks, like grasping and lifting.

He applied for a patent in 1954 and named the concept Universal Automation - later shortened to Unimation - and received a patent in 1961.

Fellow engineer Joseph Engelberger formed a company, Unimation Inc., to adapt and apply Mr. Devol's ideas and those of others, and soon came up with the Unimate, a highly successful effort to replace factory workers with robotic machinery.

In 1961, General Motors put the first Unimate arm on an assembly line at the company's Trenton plant. The device was used to lift and stack die-cast metal parts taken hot from their molds. Chrysler and Ford soon followed suit, despite resistance from labor unions, and Unimates designed for welding, spray-painting, applying adhesives, and other potentially hazardous jobs were in production by 1966.

In 2002, Popular Mechanics magazine listed Unimate as one of the top 50 inventions of the last 50 years. An early model is in the collection at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. In May of this year, Mr. Devol was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

- N.Y. Times News Service