Hired Girl

Hired Girl is Dan Davis’s first commercially successful household automaton: a self-directing floor cleaner whose modest ability to work without supervision distinguished it from an ordinary vacuum cleaner. Developed with Miles Gentry in a small Mojave Desert factory, it made Davis’s ambition to work for himself concrete and established the business that later produced a family of machines bearing the same trade-mark.

Origins and Purpose

After the war, Davis and Miles went into business as cold sleep began to be sold. Davis wanted work on a scale one engineer could undertake, rather than a career in a large corporation or civil service. He had studied electronics, linkages, and cybernetics while serving in the government, and saw automation as a field where a small venture might still reach the market without years of development or vast capital.

The household was his chosen setting because, in his view, domestic work had been conspicuously slow to become automated. He did not set out to redesign the house; he aimed at the persistent need to clean floors. The name Hired Girl deliberately invoked the immigrant domestic worker whom a grandmother might bully, making the machine’s premise legible through an established servant role. Davis described the first model not as an intelligent robot but as a better vacuum cleaner, intended to sell for a price competitive with ordinary cleaning equipment.

Design and Operation

The first Hired Girl was built to clean floors continuously and without human supervision. It could sweep, mop, vacuum, or polish, consulting memory tapes to choose the appropriate method. It collected objects larger than a BB shot in a tray for a person to decide whether to keep or discard, and searched for dirt in patterns intended to miss nothing. In occupied rooms it generally moved out of the way, unless its owner switched it on to signal that it was welcome. Near dinnertime it returned to its stall for a quick charge; this model preceded the installation of an everlasting power pack.

The machine’s apparent autonomy depended on a deliberately limited kind of memory. Davis explained that a Thorsen tube could record an operation demonstrated by manual control and then direct a machine through the same operation repeatedly. Additional circuits could search within set limits and interrupt the stored routine when circumstances did not match it. This was not human judgment, in Davis’s account, but a way to make a machine handle repetitive tasks. The principle later informed more capable automata: a later machine could be shown once how to clear a table, scrape dishes, and load a dishwasher, then repeat the sequence; an electronically duplicated tube could even carry the instruction to another machine.

Engineering and Manufacture

Hired Girl was an assembly of existing techniques rather than a wholly new invention. Davis adapted a basic roaming pattern from the “Electric Turtles” described in Scientific American, used a memory circuit from a guided missile, and combined cleaning devices and linkages drawn from equipment including an army-hospital floor polisher, a soft-drink dispenser, and the manipulators used in atomic facilities. He credited the invention’s patentable originality to the way those elements were combined, and pointed to production engineering as the deeper achievement.

Most components could be ordered from Sweet’s Catalogue. The exceptions were two three-dimensional cams, which Davis made in the partners’ shed with war-surplus automated tools, and a printed circuit, which they subcontracted. Davis and Miles initially formed the entire assembly line, fitting, filing, and painting the machines themselves. The pilot model cost $4,317.09; the first hundred cost just over $39 apiece. They sold that batch to a Los Angeles discount house for $60 per unit, and the retailer sold them for $85. Because the partners could not afford sales promotion, they accepted consignment terms and nearly ran out of money before sales revenue arrived. A two-page feature in Life then brought enough demand to require additional assembly help.

Commercial Success and Legacy

The decisive selling point was narrow but consequential: Hired Girl cleaned without supervision. Davis emphasized that there was little difference between the Mark One and a vacuum cleaner, except that it could work on its own; that difference was enough to sell. Its success arose from matching a persistent domestic task to a buildable machine and a viable price, rather than from endowing the device with humanlike intelligence.

Hired Girl also gave the partners’ enterprise its name and helped shape its early organization. When Belle Darkin joined as typist and bookkeeper, the company incorporated and gave her a share of stock; Miles became president and general manager, while Davis served as chief engineer and chairman, retaining 51 percent. Years later, after Davis had lost his shares, he saw Hired Girl and its related machines advertised widely under the trade-mark he had designed: a sturdy girl with a broom. He regretted having disposed of his stock, but considered it fortunate that Ricky had received it instead of the people he believed would otherwise have taken it. The surviving brand thus carried both the product’s commercial reach and the gendered domestic imagery built into its original name.

Development into Other Automata

Hired Girl’s success belonged to an expanding line rather than a final design. Davis had invented the original machine and its “kinfolk,” including Window Willie. In a later period of renewed engineering work, he built Drafting Dan first because the old compass-and-T-square method consumed too much time, then rebuilt Flexible Frank as Protean Pete, an all-purpose automaton whose capabilities depended on properly instructed Thorsen tubes. He expected such a general-purpose machine to give way to specialized descendants, while seeking broad patent claims. These later designs reflect the same practical method as Hired Girl—recombine available components, make the machine demonstrable and economical to produce, and let the state of technology determine what can be built—while extending its premise from an unsupervised floor cleaner toward machines capable of many kinds of work.