1966 – Mechanical Rat – Meredith Thring (British)

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette – Feb 1, 1967 ……..  He [Professor Meredith Wooldridge Thring, 51, professor of mechanical engineering at London's Queen Mary College] suggested a trip to one of his laboratories. "Here you see our mechanical rat," he explained. He pointed to a gadget about the size of a boy's electric train. Before it lay a …

1962 – Mechanical Maze with Memory – R.J. Curran (American)

Robert J. Curran's Mechanical Maze is included here as it is essentially a mechanical computer, exhibiting similar characteristics as other electro-mechanical maze solvers. As the mouse travels a path, if it has to back out due to a dead-end, the return pass triggers a mechanical latch to give the maze a "memory". The patent description gives …

1962 – MELPAR Bionic Maze – R.J. Lee (American)

pdf – Popular Electronics October 1962 Bionics Bionic "Mouse." As mentioned earlier, RCA is working on a far more complicated moving-target indicator containing hundreds of neurons which operates on the same principle. But perhaps the most important piece of neural-bionic hardware to come out of the laboratories so far is a "bionic mouse" built by the …

1959 – Labyrinth solver with Ariadne’s Thread – Zemanek & Eier (Austrian)

Now in the Vienna Technical Museum. Period photo showing Richard Eier opening the covers of the Labyrinth. Zitat:  Gerhard Chroust, "Cybernetic Animals at the Technical University of Vienna" , in IFSR Newsletter, Vol. 18, Nummer 2, Seite(n) 2, 1999  CYBERNETIC ANIMALS AT THE TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA G. Chroust Around 1960 Cybernetics was the path …

1955 – Electronic Mouse Maze Solver – Harry Rudloe (American)

The original article appeared in Scientific American, The Amateur Scientist,  An Electronic Mouse That Learns From Experience by Harry Rudloe, 1955 Mar, pg 116 .   This copy from C. L. Stong.  The Amateur Scientist.  Ill. by Roger Hayward.  S&S, 1960.  The Electronic Mouse That Learns From Experience, pp. 394-398.  Harry Rudloe describes a relay circuit …