Not many people can be said to have truly shaped the course of global manufacturing. They include Henry Ford, W. Edwards Deming and Taiichi Ohno. We lost another last month.

NEWTOWN, CT—Joseph F. Engelberger, an engineer and entrepreneur who pioneered the robotics field, died Dec. 1, 2015, at age 90. Engelberger was founder and president of Unimation Inc., the world’s first industrial robotics manufacturer, which he launched in 1956 and grew into a company with more than 1,000 employees before the enterprise was acquired by Westinghouse.