"Robert A. Heinlein - The Door into Summer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

The whole thing was a risk the enemy had not calculated, so when the war
was over I was paid off instead of being liquidated or sent to a slave camp,
and Miles and I went into business together about the time the insurance
companies started selling cold sleep.
We went to the Mojave Desert, set up a small factory in an Air Force surplus
building, and started making Hired Girl, my engineering and MilesтАЩs law and
business experience. Yes, I invented Hired Girl and all her kinfolk-Window
Willie and the rest-even though you wonтАЩt find my name on them. While I was
in the service I had thought hard about what one engineer can do. Go to work
for Standard, or du Pont, or General Motors? Thirty years later they give you
a testimonial dinner and a pension. You havenтАЩt missed any meals, youтАЩve
had a lot of rides in company airplanes. But you are never your own boss.
The other big market for engineers is civil service-good starting pay, good
pensions, no worries, thirty days annual leave, liberal benefits. But I had just
had a long government vacation and wanted to be my own boss.
What was there small enough for one engineer and not requiring six million
man-hours before the first model was on the market? Bicycle-shop
engineering with peanuts for capital, the way Ford and the Wright brothers
had started-people said those days were gone forever; I didnтАЩt believe it.
Automation was booming-chemical-engineering plants that required only two
gauge-watchers and a guard, machines that printed tickets in one city and
marked the space тАЮsoldтАЬ in six other cities, steel moles that mined coal while
the 13MW boys sat back and watched. So while I was on Uncle SamтАЩs
payroll I soaked up all the electronics, linkages, and cybernetics that a
clearance would permit.
What was the last thing to go automatic? Answer: any housewifeтАЩs house. I
didnтАЩt attempt to figure out a sensible scientific house; women didnтАЩt want
one; they simply wanted a better upholstered cave. But housewives were still
complaining about the Servant Problem long after servants had gone the way
of the mastodon. I had rarely met a housewife who did not have a touch of
slaveholder in her; they seemed to think there really ought to be strapping
peasant girls grateful for a chance to scrub floors fourteen hours a day and
eat table scraps at wages a plumberтАЩs helper would scorn.
ThatтАЩs why we called the monster Hired Girl-it brought back thoughts of the
semi-slave immigrant girl whom Grandma used to bully. Basically it was just
a better vacuum cleaner and we planned to market it at a price competitive
with ordinary suck brooms.
What Hired Girl would do (the first model, not the semi-intelligent robot I
developed it into) was to clean floors . . . any floor, all day long and without
supervision. And there never was a floor that didnтАЩt need cleaning.
It swept, or mopped, or vacuum-cleaned, or polished, consulting tapes in its
idiot memory to decide which. Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up
and placed in a tray on its upper surface, for someone brighter to decide
whether to keep or throw away. It went quietly looking for dirt all day long, in
search curves that could miss nothing, passing over clean floors in its
endless search for dirty floors. It would get out of a room with people in it, like
a well-trained maid, unless its mistress caught up with it and flipped a switch
to tell the poor thing it was welcome. Around dinnertime it would go to its stall
and soak up a quick charge-this was before we installed the everlasting
power pack.