In the late 1950s, most household chores still fell entirely on women’s shoulders. Laundry, cleaning, cooking — all of it was done by hand. Austrian engineer Claus Scholz-Nauendorff looked at that reality and set out to change it with a machine.
Between 1957 and 1958, Scholz-Nauendorff built the MM7 Selektor, a robot designed to carry out everyday household tasks without a person guiding it. It could vacuum floors and pour liquids — basic but meaningful jobs that took real time out of a person’s day. The robot ran on electricity and was engineered to operate on its own, without needing a human to direct each step.
At a time when most people thought of robots as science fiction, the MM7 Selektor was a working machine. Its target audience was clear: women who were managing homes while also entering the workforce in growing numbers. A robot that could handle chores independently gave them something valuable — time.
True autonomy, however, came with hard engineering problems. One of the biggest was getting the robot to switch itself on and off reliably. Scholz-Nauendorff identified this as a key obstacle to full independence. A robot that needed a person to turn it on or shut it down was only partly autonomous, and he knew it.
He did not stop at the MM7. Scholz-Nauendorff went on to develop the MM9 robot, continuing to push the limits of what a machine could do on its own. His career was defined by a single consistent goal: build machines that could think through a task and complete it without human help.
The engineering challenges of that era were enormous. Microprocessors did not yet exist. Programming logic had to be built into physical mechanisms. Every function the robot performed required a deliberate, carefully constructed solution in hardware.
The MM7 Selektor drew real public attention when it was introduced. People were not used to seeing a machine navigate domestic space and perform practical work. It shifted how some engineers and thinkers understood what robotics could realistically achieve in everyday settings, not just in factories or laboratories.
Scholz-Nauendorff’s focus was always on practical application. He was not building robots for spectacle. The MM7 was meant to work inside a real home, on real floors, handling real objects. That design philosophy set it apart from many experimental machines of the same period.
The question of autonomous operation — machines deciding when to act — was the central problem Scholz-Nauendorff wrestled with throughout his work. Getting a robot to start a task when needed and stop when done, without a person initiating either action, required solving problems that the field of robotics would spend decades refining.
His two major inventions — the MM7 Selektor and the MM9 — were built during a period when robotics had no established roadmap. Scholz-Nauendorff was working at the frontier, making decisions that no one had made before, and building machines that demonstrated autonomous household robotics was not just theoretical.
