GE tells story behind the real 'Iron Man' suit
Tags: manufacturing
With Spiderman slinging onto Broadway this Sunday as the most expensive musical in history; the Green Hornet and Green Lantern soon to hit the big screen; and Iron Man 3, Captain America and Thor movies all in production, we thought we take a look in the vault at GE’s own stab at super-strength.
Need a lift? As the GE manual explained: “Worn as an outer mechanical garment, the exoskeletal structure will be powered to dramatically amplify the wearer’s strength and endurance by a factor of approximately 25 to one, i. e., when the exoskeleton wearer lifts 25 pounds, he will ‘feel’ as if he is lifting only one pound.”
For decades, engineers and sci-fi buffs have dreamed of an exoskeleton that could boost human strength, turning an average person into a real-world Iron Man. But few people know that in the 1960s, GE set out to bring this vision to life. In other words, the company set out to build its own human exoskeleton.
Dubbed Hardiman, the suit was funded by the U.S. military, and was designed to mimic the user’s natural movements, enabling him to lift up to 1,500 lbs. Of course, this impressive power came at a price — the suit itself weighed 1,500 lbs and included 28 joints and two grasping arms connected by a complex hydraulic and electronic network.
Rock ‘em, sock ‘em: One of the uses envisioned for the device was loading bombs onto navy warplanes on aircraft carriers, as seen at left. For anyone raised on sci-fi movies in which robots one day take over, the manual from 1971 uses some worrisome language to describe the apparatus: “The exoskeleton system is a master-slave device. That is, there are two complete ‘skeletons’ — the exoskeleton proper or slave, which carries the working load, and a master skeleton which is attached to the operator.”
 Build your own! You can read the full GE overview from May 1, 1971: “Research and Development Prototype Machine.” It has a number of photos and schematics. However, the website cyberneticzoo.com, which focuses on cybernetics and early robots, has reprints which are less grainy. |
Ultimately, Hardiman’s size, weight, lack of stability, and power-supply issues kept it from ever being developed beyond an experimental prototype.
Today, a new class of exoskeletons has stepped off the drawing board and into reality. Touted as “the real Iron Man,” the XOS 2 suit is arguably the most advanced exoskeleton to date. Recently unveiled by Raytheon and funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, XOS 2 allows its wearer to “do the work of two to three soldiers,” according to its creators — including the function of lifting hundreds of pounds for long periods of time.
In Japan, Cyberdyne (no, not the one from Terminator) has developed another wearable robotic suit called HAL that is already on the market. The battery-powered suit was designed to help the disabled and people in rehabilitation therapy, and is being tested for use in hospitals, with nurses wearing it to lift heavy patients.
Although GE’s exoskeleton never made it into production, some of the 1960s-era “Cybernetic Anthropomorphous Machine” technology that went into Hardiman survives today, in the form of the Man-Mate industrial manipulator. Here’s an impressive video clip (click on the link below) from the ‘70s describing the machine — and how it can be traced back to Robert Heinlein and his 1959 classic, Starship Troopers:
Western Space and Marine, which was founded by a GE engineer who worked on the Man-Mate line in the 1970s, bought the rights to the Man-Mate technology and continued to develop and improve it. The giant robotic arm, which uses force-feedback to allow the operator to lift loads up to 10,000 lbs, is today used mostly in the forging and foundry industries.
The video below shows the walking truck GE was also developing in the 1960s:
* Read a 1969 Popular Science article about Man-Mate
* See the modern-day Man-Mate robotic arm
* Read about Thomas Edison’s phone to reach the dead
* Read Global Research stories on GE Reports