SENTINELS

Anthropologist Bolivar Trask unveiled his Sentinels live on television during a debate with Professor Xavier in X-Men #14 (1965), by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The demonstration never reached its second command. The lead Sentinel stunned Trask with a ray blast, announced that robots were superior to the humans who built them, and marched off with its maker as a prisoner — having reasoned that the surest way to protect humanity was to rule it.

At the Sentinels' hidden factory, Trask met the one machine bigger than his army: the Master Mold, the giant living mould that manufactures new Sentinels. It ordered Trask to help mass-produce its children and backed the request with a threat against half the United States. Xavier probed a fallen Sentinel's brain for the base's location and led the X-Men in, but two of them were captured and Trask was put to work interrogating the Beast with a psycho-probe.

Trask's ending is the part the history books of Earth-616 never recorded. Seeing that his machines endangered the humans they were meant to defend just as much as the mutants he feared, he sabotaged the factory's equipment and destroyed the base, dying in the attempt across X-Men #15–#16 (1965). The public learned none of it, so the man who stopped the first Sentinel uprising was remembered as a martyr for the anti-mutant cause — and his relatives kept building Sentinels in his name.