Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
The idea of the robot - an autonomous, even sentient machine - has been around for millennia. In Ancient Greek mythology, the blacksmith god Hephaestus, whose legs were injured as a child, crafted a pair of mechanical women to help him walk. From the Middle Ages onwards, various master craftsmen constructed increasingly sophisticated clockwork automatons that dazzled and bewildered audiences the world over, such as mechanical ducks that walked, ate, and defecated, and human figures that wrote, sang, and even played chess - and for more on that, please check out or previous video The 18th Century Chess Robot That Defeated Napoleon, Ben Franklin, and Countless Others. The word “Robot,” however, is of far more recent origin. Derived from a slavic word meaning “slave labourer,” the term first appeared in Czech playwright Karel Čapek’s 1920 play Rossum’s Universal Robots, about a race of sentient artificial beings created for servitude who rise up against their human masters. But while the English lexicon was slow to catch up to the idea of the robot, technology was slower still, and it would not be until the digital electronics revolution of the 1960s and 70s that truly programmable and automatic machines would become a practical reality. In the late 1930s, however, the average American could catch a glimpse of this technological future in the form of a moonwalking, wisecracking, cigarette-smoking android called Elektro the Moto Man - the world’s first celebrity robot.
Author: Gilles Messier
Host: Simon Whistler
Producer: Samuel Avila
Editor: Daven Hiskey
The idea of the robot - an autonomous, even sentient machine - has been around for millennia. In Ancient Greek mythology, the blacksmith god Hephaestus, whose legs were injured as a child, crafted a pair of mechanical women to help him walk. From the Middle Ages onwards, various master craftsmen constructed increasingly sophisticated clockwork automatons that dazzled and bewildered audiences the world over, such as mechanical ducks that walked, ate, and defecated, and human figures that wrote, sang, and even played chess - and for more on that, please check out or previous video The 18th Century Chess Robot That Defeated Napoleon, Ben Franklin, and Countless Others. The word “Robot,” however, is of far more recent origin. Derived from a slavic word meaning “slave labourer,” the term first appeared in Czech playwright Karel Čapek’s 1920 play Rossum’s Universal Robots, about a race of sentient artificial beings created for servitude who rise up against their human masters. But while the English lexicon was slow to catch up to the idea of the robot, technology was slower still, and it would not be until the digital electronics revolution of the 1960s and 70s that truly programmable and automatic machines would become a practical reality. In the late 1930s, however, the average American could catch a glimpse of this technological future in the form of a moonwalking, wisecracking, cigarette-smoking android called Elektro the Moto Man - the world’s first celebrity robot.
Author: Gilles Messier
Host: Simon Whistler
Producer: Samuel Avila
Editor: Daven Hiskey
