In the Greek myths, it was the Titan, or Prometheus, who supplied fire (and therefore technology) to human beings and for that he was dreadfully punished by the infuriated Zeus, who was the chief god.
In early modern times, mechanical clocks were perfected, and the small mechanisms that ran them ("clockwork")-the springs, gears, escapements, ratchets, and so on-could also be used to run other devices.
The 1700s was the golden age of "automatons." These were devices that could, given a source of power such as a wound spring or compressed air, carry out a complicated series of activities. Toy soldiers were built that would march; toy ducks that would quack, bathe, drink water, eat grain and void it; toy boys that could dip a pen into ink and write a letter (always the same letter, of course). Such automata were put on display and proved extremely popular (and, sometimes, profitable to the owners).
It was a dead-end sort of thing, of course, but it kept alive the thought of mechanical devices that might do more than clockwork tricks, that might be more nearly alive.
What's more, science was advancing rapidly, and in 1798, the Italian anatomist, Luigi Galvani, found that under the influence of an electric spark, dead muscles could be made to twitch and contract as though they were alive. Was it possible that electricity was the secret of life?
The thought naturally arose that artificial life could be brought into being by strictly scientific principles rather than by reliance on gods or demons. This thought led to a book that some people consider the first piece of modern science fiction-Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, published in 1818.
In this book, Victor Frankenstein, an anatomist, collects fragments of freshly dead bodies and, by the use of new scientific discoveries (not specified in the book), brings the whole to life, creating something that is referred to only as the "Monster" in the book. (In the movie, the life principle was electricity.)
However, the switch from the supernatural to science did not eliminate the fear of the danger inherent in knowledge. In the medieval legend of Rabbi Loew's golem, that monster went out of control and the rabbi had to withdraw the divine name and destroy him. In the modern tale of Frankenstein, the hero was not so lucky. He abandoned the Monster in fear, and the Monster, with an anger that the book all but justifies, in revenge killed those Frankenstein loved and, eventually, Frankenstein himself.
This proved a central theme in the science fiction stories that have appeared since Frankenstein. The creation of robots was looked upon as the prime example of the overweening arrogance of humanity, of its attempt to take on, through misdirected science, the mantle of the divine. The creation of human life, with a soul, was the sole prerogative of God. For a human being to attempt such a creation was to produce a soulless travesty that inevitably became as dangerous as the golem and as the Monster. The fashioning of a robot was, therefore, its own eventual punishment, and the lesson, "there are some things that humanity is not meant to know," was preached over and over again.
No one used the word "robot," however, until 1920 (the year, coincidentally, in which I was born). In that year, a Czech playwright, Karel Capek, wrote the play R.U.R., about an Englishman, Rossum, who manufactured artificial human beings in quantity. These were intended to do the arduous labor of the world so that real human beings could live lives of leisure and comfort.
Capek called these artificial human beings "robots," which is a Czech word for "forced workers," or "slaves." In fact, the title of the play stands for "Rossum's Universal Robots," the name of the hero's firm.
In this play, however, what I call "the Frankenstein complex" was made several notches more intense. Where Mary Shelley's Monster destroyed only Frankenstein and his family, Capek's robots were presented as gaining emotion and then, resenting their slavery, wiping out the human species.
The play was produced in 1921 and was sufficiently popular (though when I read it, my purely personal opinion was that it was dreadful) to force the word "robot" into universal use. The name for an artificial human being is now "robot" in every language, as far as I know.
Through the 1920s and 1930s, R U.R. helped reinforce the Frankenstein complex, and (with some notable exceptions such as Lester del Rey's "Helen O'Loy" and Eando Binder's "Adam Link" series) the hordes of clanking, murderous robots continued