Tin Toy Robots

Humans have long-held a fascination with creating self-propelling human like forms. The first robots, automatons date back as early as the 1700's and were incredibly intricate and only for the extremely wealthy. They were works of art and cutting edge technology in their day.

As humans became interested in space travel and the possibility of life on other planets. Films, books and television, particularly in the 1950's became flooded with fantastical visions of the future and flying saucers and robots became part of popular culture. The creators of tin toys became inspired by this and started to develop many and varied tin robots with different personalities and mechanisms.

Some of the robots were aggressive and wanted to take over our planet like our Sparking Tin Robot shooting laser beams from his eyes. Whilst others cleaned up around the house and did domestic chores like a 1950's house wife in a sit-com Roxy Robot.

Robots are very much part of popular culture and intertwined with ideas of outer space the future and modernisation why else would you have a robot called Mr Atomic perhaps a way to document the development of the new and deadly energy supply of the time.

Amongst our robots is also the more traditional musical automaton harking back to the very early days of automated music in the form of the Drumming Robot. Tin robots and automatons are an ingenious mixture of tin, cogs, gears, imagination and ingenuity that speak to us across generations.