"Waldo" (1942) is a short story by American writer Robert A. Heinlein, originally published in Astounding Magazine in August 1942 under the pseudonym Anson MacDonald.

Waldo Farthingwaite-Jones was born a weakling, unable even to lift his head up to drink or to hold a spoon.

Far from destroying him, this channeled his intellect, and his family's money, into the development of the device patented as "Waldo F. Jones' Synchronous Reduplicating Pantograph".

In reference to this story, the real-life remote manipulators that were later developed also came to be called waldos,[2] some even by NASA.

Afterward, in the dressing room, while preparing to depart for his other job as a neurosurgeon, the dancer reminisces to a reporter about what made him take up dancing.

James Stevens, Chief Engineer of North American Power-Air (NAPA), is desperate to discover what is causing vehicles driven by broadcast power to cease functioning.

Society has harnessed cheap atomic power, broadcast by NAPA, to run homes, factories, ground vehicles, and even personal aircraft which can travel into space.

Waldo lives on a space station in high orbit, where microgravity allows him to move around despite his weakness.

Shipped down in a medical craft, with Grimes in attendance, he lies in his waterbed while Schneider examines him.

In Schneider's hands, Waldo does indeed experience a sense of well-being, and is able to lift up a coffee cup one-handed for the first time in his life.

McLeod, according to Schneider, was "tired and fretful", and found one of the "bad truths", causing the deKalbs to fail.

Waldo, thrown off balance by the "impossible" thing he has just seen, decides to twit Stevens with Rambeau's words: "Magic is loose in the world!"

Having received their formal acknowledgment that he has fulfilled his contract, he unveils the "Jones-Schneider deKalb", a Rube Goldberg contraption which appears to draw power from nowhere.

Of course, NAPA offers a settlement from which Waldo profits hugely, even though the new deKalb is a repaired one with a lot of distracting technology attached.

L. Sprague de Camp praised "Waldo" for reflecting Heinlein's typical virtues: "his prodigality of invention, his shrewd grasp of human nature and his versatile knowledge of law, politics, business and science."

"[4] A typical illustration of the tools in the story is Waldo's handling of his need to perform micro-dissection on the scale of cellular walls.

There are three main factors involved in Heinlein's description of the tools: The time in which the story is set is not mentioned, but is clearly decades ahead of the 1940s when it was written.

The slogan on the button is "Free Silver", a reference to the politics of the late 1800s in the United States.