Dale Dougherty is the founder of Maker Faire. He is on Twitter.

A World's Fair offered the promise of what the future would bring, and its standard bearers were large companies who built elaborate pavilions that helped to make a vision of the future seem real. At the 1939 World's Fair in Queens, Westinghouse introduced Elektro, a 7-foot tall robot that could speak with a vocabulary of 700 words, smoke cigarettes and blow up balloons. The voice box for this electro-mechanical robot was a 78-r.p.m. record player.

Today, we have lots of people building robots that are much more sophisticated than Elektro, and easier and cheaper to construct; indeed you can see some of them at this year's Maker Faire in Queens. As the founder of Maker Faire, where individuals and groups of tinkerers, hackers, artists, inventors and builders come together to demonstrate how technology and talent can change our lives and the world around us, I think of the Maker Faire as the new World's Fair: the people's fair.

Daniel Mears/The Detroit News, via Associated Press

It is important for us as a society to imagine the future, and the World's Fair provided a context for doing so. But it is also vital that we see ourselves participating actively in creating or making that future, and that's what we believe Maker Faire is doing. Oh, and Mr. Greenhalgh, we just had one in Detroit -- for the fifth year in a row!



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