![]() ![]() Truitt traces the production of automata back to the 3 rd century BCE, and the moving figures designed and built by engineers trained in Alexandria, ancient Egypt. We owe its expert compilers a debt of gratitude for their research and while the book looks beyond the simple history of robots as machines to address essentially philosophical questions such as the difference between a robot and a human, questions that exceed the scope of this article, we shall refer extensively to its historical findings here, in summary form.Ĭontributing author E. What do we know about the History of Robots?Ī useful recent source on the history of robots, particularly focused on those designed to take a human form, is the book ‘Robots: the 500-year quest to make machines human’ edited by Ben Russell, Curator of Mechanical Engineering at the Science Museum, London, and published in 2017 by Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers Ltd. ![]() It was only in 1941 that the volume of references to 'robot' first surpassed that of references to 'automaton' and they subsequently changed places over the following decades, before 'robot' definitively took the upper hand in 1971 while the plural form 'robots' first overook 'automata' in 1931 before also changing places with it sporadically over the decades to follow, and definitively surpassing it in 1978. In fact, a study of literary references as automatically collated by Google Ngram shows that 'automaton' and 'automata' have continued to be widely used alongside 'robot' and 'robots' to the present day. The modern use of the word ‘robots’ in representation of machines that operate automatically dates back to Czech writer Karel Čapek's science fiction play Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti, first published in 1920 before then, the term ‘automata’ was widely used instead to convey the same meaning.īefore 1920, 'robots', though it was in fairly common use as a word, was typically restricted in its application to the sense of servile human labourers: see for example the references in 'Revelations of Austria Volume 2' by Michał Kubrakiewicz (1846). Since the use of the modifier ‘especially’ implicitly extends the definition of robot to all forms of machine that carry out complex actions automatically, we must look back to before the age of computers for the first examples of robots. But it is the real-world use of robot to describe a type of machine in which we are interested here: ‘ a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by computer’. ![]() One is limited to the realm of science fiction, while another is figuratively employed in respect of people. Oxford Dictionaries gives multiple definitions of robot. Written and researched by Philip Graves for GWS Robotics, 25th-28th June, 2018 ![]()
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