The future arrived in 1968, and it had metal legs. This British Pathé newsreel takes us inside the engineering faculty at Queen Mary’s College in Mile End, London, where Professor M W Thring and his team show off a remarkable collection of early robots. Brian Shayer operates a model centipede walking machine, while Thring demonstrates a walking machine with metal legs, part of his research into powered limbs for people with limb differences, and it strides right across a table. Charles Ford runs a “Mole Miner” built to dig for minerals in places too dangerous for humans, a device imagined for a moon expedition, and then climbs into a step-climbing carriage whose wheel-mounted hooks haul it up a small stairway, designed to help Thalidomide survivors. A full-sized centipede machine even carries a man along, pitched for crossing swampy or lunar ground. The clip is a wonderful time capsule, equal parts hopeful science and retro-futurist imagination.