London’s Science Museum has launched a Kickstarter campaign to recreate Eric – the UK’s first ever robot.

Part of the institution’s plans to open a new exhibition in February next year that will celebrate 500 years of robots, the unique crowdfunding campaign would rebuild the robot, which was first created in 1928 to present a talk at an engineering exhibition when the opening speaker dropped out.

After a whirlwind publicity tour in which he met international press, celebrities and dignitaries, Eric disappeared with no one quite sure what happened to him.

The kickstarter campaign is seeking to raise £35,000 (US$50,500, €44,300) to create a reimagined Eric, using industrial waste parts modelled on old images of the robot to send Eric on a world tour before becoming part of the Robots exhibition and a permanent part of the museum’s collection.

“Created less than a decade after the word robot was first used, Eric was quintessentially British and deemed an almost perfect man by the New York press,” said Science Museum curator Ben Russell.

“Now with your support, the Science Museum and expert roboticist Giles Walker will rebuild Eric based on original archive materials.

“You can help save Eric for the nation as part of the Science Museum's permanent collection. Eric will go on public display for everyone to see for free in October 2016 for a month before he stars in the museum's major Robots exhibition opening in February 2017.”

Featuring a unique collection of more than 100 robots, from a 16th-century mechanical monk to robots from science fiction and modern-day research labs, the new Heritage Lottery Fund-supported exhibition will enable visitors to discover the cultural, historical and technological context of humanoid robots. The exhibition will also feature 12 working robots that will interact with visitors, including two life-like humanoid robots from Japan covered in artificial skin.