History
Rovation Industries has been a leader in robotics, aerospace, chemistry, and electronics for over 100 years. Founded as Rovan’s Wireless Machines in Colorado Springs around 1901 by Serbian immigrant scientist Zoran Rovanović, the firm designed a number of high-powered radio transmitters for the early radio industry. Business was brisk and Rovan, whose daughter Ada was consumptive, decreed that westward expansion would benefit both personal and professional life. Factories were opened in Fresno, Bakersfield, and Folsom in short order.
World War I
A process for insulating wires led indirectly to a lightweight, waterproof canvas that caught the attention of the Aviation Section of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Rovan’s Wireless spun off Rovan Industries and supplied the Signal Corps. with fabric for biplanes in World War I, and was experimenting with wireless flight control systems as the war ended. While the telemetry devices are lost to history, business was brisk, and the company quickly moved into other areas as needs for the fledgling military service arose. Its India rubber wheel coverings would later be treasured as collector items, and samples of the wing canvas survive to this day, a testament to Rovan’s attention to detail and quality.
To demonstrate the “duck tail canvas” for visiting Army officials, Rovan famously used a crane to dunk an entire Sopwith Camel laden with weaponry into a pond in Pine National Forest, retrieved it, then flew the biplane to a nearby landing strip in what is now the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Rovan would later admit he was not a pilot, as evidenced by his plane’s collision with a stand of holly. Rovan emerged with little more than a broken arm and a bout with amnesia, but factory foreman Peter Youkeles called Rovan “Holly” thereafter, a nickname Rovan despised.
Tesla, Freud, and Rovan
The great inventor Nikola Tesla was briefly allied with the company during this time, and announced to reporters that steam powered, remotely operated humanoid devices would bring the end to war as we knew it. Tesla did not like committing plans to paper; Rovan was an obsessive compulsive who once consulted Freud regarding his sometimes overwhelming need to document every aspect of his life, including the times of his (frustratingly seldom) visits to the bathroom and every meal down to the condiments. Their work habits clashed, and Tesla seems to have left after upending a chamber pot on Rovan’s sketches for an automaton. Rovan broke with Freud at around the same time, when the latter recommended more frequent relations with women to the apparently chaste Rovan.
World War II
Rovan’s interest in control systems, wireless telemetry, and aeronautical engineering led to a number of lucrative contracts with the United States Air Force, which succeeded the Signal Corps. In each case, however, Rovan’s desire to automate certain repetitive processes while also attempting to provide a measure of what would now be called programmability caused untenable delays. Rovan corresponded with mathematician Jon Von Neumann but stopped abruptly, claiming that “the Hungarian swine stole my ideas” in a lawsuit that was later dropped. His innovative vacuum tube circuitry was simply too heavy and too delicate for planes, and insufficient shielding caused early radar prototypes to malfunction. Rovan died in an explosion in Folsom, California, where a set of underground wind tunnels were being excavated for an Air Force project that has never been declassified.
Cold War and the “Silent Demonstration”
Now called Rovation Industries, the firm moved into jet propulsion systems, turbine design, and software development. Most important, its military robotics line, with software admired by luminaries from Dr. Edward Feynman, was never actually deployed and was instead used as a bargaining chip between the superpowers. President Eisenhower showed Soviet First Secretary Nikita Krushchev a phalanx of Rovation robots destroy a prop town near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in what historians would later call “The Silent Demonstration,” culminating in the “assassination” by sniper droids of 17 “bodyguard” mannequins in tight formation around a Krushchev lookalike mannequin with literally inhuman speed and precision leaving the faux Krushchev fully intact and, by implication, utterly exposed.
Krushchev watched quietly, then turned and said something never recorded in official transcripts. He muttered a phrase that the US translator would recall as “This could be the end of war,” eerily similar to what Tesla had said two generation before. A prototype automaton went missing from the base that night while out of Rovation custody. Shortly thereafter the contract was terminated, with Rovation forbidden by the U.S. military to find a buyer for the relatively refined robotic technology.
A sideline in wheel covers still existed, with a footnote in history being that Francis Gary Powers’ U2 was shot down with Rovation wheel coverings. Mysteriously, a few variants of the MIG-21 showed up with identical coverings sometime later.
Rovation’s research into chemical catalysts for fuel cells resulted in a portable turbine drive unit sometimes called the “flying locomotive”, because the turbines were steam powered and the catalyst, while incredibly light and relatively inert in its separation chamber, resulted in a drive system as powerful but also as expensive as an actual diesel locomotive. They were able to power flight mechanisms for small aerial systems, possibly leading to the invention of jet pack technology by other researches.