Design
Bender is a high-tech robot; he is a Unit 22 from a series of bending robots manufactured by Mom's Friendly Robot Company. His design is based on an original "gas-blasting" prototype developed by Professor Farnsworth while he was employed at Mom's at an earlier time. Robots in that series are not androids, but nevertheless have features that are anthropomorphic - designed to resemble those of humans.
Bender's factory-set height is 5 ft 6 in (1.68 m); a little over 6 ft (1.8 m) with antenna. In "The Farnsworth Parabox", Bender states that he flipped a coin to decide his color, ending up with cool gray rather than gold. He has a body with a "shiny metal ass", two legs, two arms with three fingers each, a head with two replaceable eyes shaped like light-emitting diodes, and a mouth used for fuel intake and voice communication. In "Bender Gets Made", Bender says he also has a nose, but he chooses not to wear it. Bender's human-like character is also reinforced by his ability to display many traits that are often regarded as exclusive to humans, such as whistling, snoring, having bloodshot eyes, crying, feeling at the least physical attraction, being tickled, dreaming, and belching.
Other bending units of the same model as Bender, such as Flexo, share the same hardware design, but differ in terms of their personality and behavior. For example, Flexo shows personality traits similar to those of Bender but is not quite as "evil" as Bender. In the episode "Mother's Day", Leela looks through a simulation of a bending unit's sight, which targets potential rubes and then denotes a plan to rob them and leave them in a ditch, showing that all bending robots are somewhat thieving and amoral by design. However, another unit, Billy West (named after the series voice actor of the same name), is helpful and kind, though he lives as a farmer on the Moon and insists on not being a bending unit.
Bender's serial number is 2716057, which can be expressed as the sum of 2 cubes, which is humorous to Bender and Flexo after it is learned that Flexo's serial number has the same characteristic.
Read more about this topic: Bender (Futurama)
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“A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.”
—Freeman Dyson (b. 1923)
“For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life ... for fear that I should get some of his good done to me,—some of its virus mingled with my blood.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)