Remember how I said I'd talk about the guy who looted the UFO in my Dialtone lore post?
Let's talk about Nathaniel Robot.
Born in the early 19th century to middle classed immigrants, Nathaniel initially led a fairly standard life. Then at the age of 8, they left him behind on a family trip and were so caught up in frontier shit they failed to notice and get him back for two years.
A born entrepreneur, Nathaniel made his first break into business running a way station and general store. He quickly changed his surname to Robot, a set of random letters he got by asking strangers for their favorite letter, from his birth name of Murderface, fearing the effects it may have on business.
Nathaniel made his initial fortune, however, with a different business. He made his journey west, as was fashionable at the time, and he noticed a few things rather obvious nowadays.
1: People are happy to work for you if you treat them well, especially if other places won't.
2: There were a lot of women and minorities who wanted to get into various fields, but were unable to because this was the 19th century.
With this knowledge, he set about founding a variety of businesses with the fundamental principle of hiring and treating people solely off of the quality of their work. As you can guess, he was also staunchly pro-union. Because this is my fun lil oc world and I'm god, this worked great for him.
After some years of success and significantly moving the cultural norms leftward, he moved to Alaska in hopes of high yield snow farming. While there, he discovered an alien space ship which had crashed some years prior. Like any right thinking American, he investigated alone without telling anyone. Some time later, he ran into the nearest town raving of devices 'beyond comprehension' and scheduled a demonstration. Once the day came, he showed off a computer he's fixed up, powered by a solar panel he'd pried off the ship.
After he threw money at someone smart to reverse engineer the technology, he'd essentially thrown technology ahead over a century, furthering his business. Despite this, he made many of the patents public with the logic that if someone added a brilliant extra, he could hire them, or give a grant. He was less a brilliant businessman than lucky, and the type who's willing to throw money at anything vaguely interesting.
While technology was able to extend Robot's life significantly, he eventually passed away in the mid 20th century. However, he went out with a bang, mere weeks after announcements of his company creating the first autonomous computer, dubbed a robot in his honor.
Robot's was also a life-long supporter of civil rights movements, known for bragging about his 'anonymous' donations to whichever groups looked most likely to make an effective difference. These actions by someone with an enormous influence (just look at Edison [fuck Edison], or Carnegie for people who could approximate his status) resulted in much of that world achieving the closest to full equality and equity you're going to get in the late 20th century. A known bisexual, Robot's suspected relationship with gay activist Steven Mandater would likely have resulted in scandal if not for the public perception of him being batshit insane anyway.
Examples of what caused that view were his claim that seagulls only don't talk for fear of paying taxes, his claim to have invented calculus before Newton, and the fact that before anyone told him of motion picture technology he withdrew into his rooms for a week before returning with a full script for what would to a person from our world be recognizable as the original Star Wars trilogy.