A recent post at Crimson Lightning with a boxy golden-age robot reminded me of this design from Flash Comics #52, “The Machine that Thinks Like a Man.”
The “mechanical brain” was basically a computer, but of course back in the 1940s, computers were mostly stuck in the realm of science-fiction (except for the occasional warehouse-sized monstrosity with less computing power than a modern calculator). It was built by scientific genius Evart Keenan, a recurring character who left Earth for the alien planet Karma so that his inventions wouldn’t call into the wrong hands. Oddly enough, his first appearance leads directly into the first appearance of the Thinker!
