Automated liquid handlers for biology are much older than I thought. A rough timeline: - The 96-well plate is invented in 1951 by a Hungarian physician, Gyula Takátsy, who physically drilled each well out of a plate of Lucite, a type of acrylic. - John Sever made the first "modern-looking" 96-well plate by punching it directly out of a sheet of plastic. - The first automated liquid-handling device was released in 1967 (!!!). It was called the Autotiter, and was developed by a man named Tom Astle. I found a few sentences on Astle's company: "Tomtec has succeeded since 1967 by working with its clients to help solve their liquid handling needs. From 1967 to 1981, the Company had essentially one employee, Tom Astle. From 1967 to 1971, the Company operated as Astec, Inc. In 1971 the Company's name was changed to Tomtec, and incorporated. Tom Astle has been the President and CEO since that time. In 1967, Tomtec developed the Autotiter. This automated what were then the manual microtiter techniques. The primary market was serology and virology. The original instruments were an essential element of Smith Kline's rubella vaccine program." (Photos of the original patent filing below.) - In 1986, Beckman gets into the microplate automation space. They release the Biomek 1000 and mark it as a "fast and accurate...robotic workstation" that sits on a scientist's bench, "takes over tedious manual tasks and integrates the work of four different instruments." I found these details in a Beckman ad, which was published in a 1987 issue of the "Journal of Automatic Chemistry." Photos below. The Beckman device looks fully modern; it could even connect to an IBM computer so scientists could program new methods on it. I couldn't find a launch price, but the device was similar to the Zymark Zymate, and that device cost about $35,000 when it released in the 1980s, which would be equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars today.