I have been doing some research about the history of FIRST. We all know that the first robotics competition that FIRST held was in 1992. In their 2003 annual report, however, Dean says that FIRST has been around since 1989.
I was under the impression that everything started in 1992. What did FIRST do from 1989-1991?
Development, I would assume. Getting sponsors, volunteers, helping to recruit the original teams…as well as the added time it takes to run a competition for the first time. Sure, in 2004, FIRST has running competitions down to a science, but the first time something like that happens it takes exponentially longer to plan and execute.
Edit: 1989 is probably the year he officially started it as more than just an idea in his head.
The answer lies at the MIT science museum in i think Cambridge, Mass. The idea of first was started by Woodie Flowers in his engineering classes at MIT. He held a competition which included plastic balls and cups and these crazy swinging arms. I believe Dean caught on to what Woodie was doing(to an extent) and from there FIRST grew. If you get a chance, last I knew there was a cool video about it at the museum.
-Pat
1992 wasn’t the first FIRST competition. This came as a surprise to me when Dave Lavery mentioned it to me. In 1991 (I believe), FIRST held a proof-of-concept competition to prepare for the official start year. That’s about all I know about it.
Matt
Does anyone know anything about this ‘phantom’ competition? 
Or should I fire an e-mail to FIRST?
Or maybe to Dave Lavery 
From Matt’s post, it sounds like he may know something about this.
What Woodie was doing at MIT was a class that was a little less then 92s Maize Craze but more then 8th grades making a mousetrap car. My understanding is that Dean saw how excited the students were to actually BUILD something and compete that he wanted to do that for highschool students.
1989 is the year that FIRST the organization was legally incorparated, and 1992 was the year of the first offical competition. The time between was fundrasing, finding schools to participate, finding sponsers for the teams, makeing a game. There is a lot of prep work for each years game, and they had to make the entire orginazation too.
Wetzel
Guys,
Woodie’s competitions were an annual event for one of his classes. He had been doing the competition for many years by the time 1992 rolled around. It was actually broadcast on PBS via pickup by the local Boston station, WGBH. Fed to the PBS network, many station around the country would broadcast it in Saturday afternoon (non prime time) programming. It also changed from year to year. At least one time it had ping pong balls on a dual sided and sloped playing field. The winning team had a mechanism that would cross the center of the field and steal all of the balls accumulated by the other team.
This competition also was a team effort involving offensive and defensive strategies as well as mechanical design skills.
The MIT 2.70 contest (now 2.007) was a lot more than a mouse trap competition. Usually, over 200 students filled the MIT machine shop to build some fairly sophisticated teleoperated robots.
The competition structure gave rise to FIRST’s qualification/elimination structure.
The class and competition still go on (see http://pergatory.mit.edu/2.007/) under the supervision of Prof. Abner Slocum.
Actually, it looks like Woody didn’t start the 2.70 competition (at least according to Brad Stone’s Gearheads book), although it sounds like he shaped it quite a bit. He souped up the kit of parts and I think he may have been the one who started changing the challenge each year instead of reusing the same competition each year.
Dave, you are correct. Prof. Woodie Flowers did not start the competition. In 1970, Prof. H.H. Richardson started the (then named) 2.70 curriculum competition. Woodie worked with that “competition” from 1973-1994, among most of the time working with other professors. I don’t personally know if this is what sparked Dean’s mind to start the US FIRST Robotics competition, but i would think at some point it would have had an effect because DEKA Research is now a sponsor for the 2.007 course.