Wu remembered being fascinated by motion and the mechanics of motion when he was just 10 years old. “I didn’t like to study, didn’t like going to school,” said the farmer, whose formal education ended after third grade. But he loved playing with machines.
He first started building mechanical parts in the 1980s and has since completed 33 working robots, most of which are littered around his dusty courtyard house. They’re an eclectic-looking bunch, sort of Tim Burton meets Wallace and Gromit.
One of the earlier models is a simple-looking box that, when turned on, waves a hand fan back and forth. It turns out it was a love letter of sorts to Dong.
“We had known each other for six months, but she wasn’t that interested in me or my machines,” said Wu. “When I built that for her, to help keep her cool when she was resting, she seemed to reconsider her opinion of me.”
But it took Dong a long time to truly accept her husband’s eccentric habits. Particularly after their home burned down due to a faulty transformer he’d picked up somewhere.
“I was so angry, I took the two sons and left, saying to him, how can I live like this?” recalled his long-suffering wife, who now laughs when she tells the story. “After all these years all you have are these few poor houses, but then you burned them down!”
She did eventually relent and return to Wu. Meanwhile, he has gone on to acquire some fame in China after all these years.
Wu, whose robots earned him nationwide fame when he was voted China’s smartest inventor farmer in 2004 on a local television station in Hunan province, has begun making some money off his creations and appears to be juggling three or four projects at any given time. They include a top-secret health venture for a company and the odd commission by a well-off businessman looking for a quirky gadget (he recently sold another robot to a factory boss for $1,400).
But the erstwhile farmer said he wants to prosper one day with his robots. His hope is “to work with my second son to make intelligent robots,” he said. “Then maybe we can really make something that will take off.”
They say that if you pursue what you are passionate about the money will come. For some it takes longer than others, but I believe it's true.
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