A Letter From The Publisher, Dec. 8, 1980

Correspondent Christopher Redman's first encounter with a robot came late last summer at Ford's Wayne assembly plant just outside Detroit. "The thing looked like a demented turkey, but it wielded a welding gun with deadly efficiency and made a tremendous impression on me," says Redman. "I later found that the sparks from the welding gun had made a tremendous impression on my clothes as well." That confrontation helped spark this week's cover story on the robot revolution. "I became fascinated with them," says Redman. "Not just with the way they worked, but with...

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