What happened to Robert the smoking robot?

More than 80 years ago, a robot could be found in the unlikely surroundings of Kettering, directing traffic and smoking a cigarette. Today, the story of Robert the Robot is little known, even in the Northamptonshire town where he was once a celebrity. Yet in the 1930s, his fame reached as far as Czechoslovakia and the United States, where he even featured in Time magazine. And the reason he came to be? "Someone bet me £5 I could not make a robot in three weeks," inventor Charles Lawson, who had a radio shop, told a newspaper at the time. The electrical engineer's creation first hit headlines in the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph, which proclaimed: "Kettering robot'enjoys' smoke."