>>148988795
I love this topic. You can get very technical about what makes a machine and bring up many far older examples of """machines""" but when it comes to robots specifically in my opinion the first one in history is definitely Charles Babbage's Difference Engine. The project evolved and upgraded to better designs which finished building decades later so the original design was never completely built in its entirety but the very first prototype Babbage made was a small Difference Engine in 1822 which he showed the world, the British Government was interested and they funded the construction of the full thing. Difference Engine no. 1 was never completed but in 1832 Babbage and Joseph Clement did finish one-seventh of the full thing which worked independently on its own perfectly. A primitive massive calculator the size of a whole room powered by cranking a handle manually. The first computer in history was born.
Lady Byron of England described seeing the Difference Engine no. 1 prototype in 1833 as "The thinking machine (or so it seems)".
From this moment onwards I believe and I have heard there was a general primitive idea of "Thinking machines" of sorts floating around the imaginations of people in the following 50 years as the Industrial Revolution reshaped the world at a rate never seen before in completely astonishing ways that would have been talk of mysticism or fiction just a hundred years prior, however I don't have any specific examples of literature or any public discussion at all of the idea of robots or artificial intelligence that I can give of this time period so I can't claim to be correct but as I said before, I do believe I'm right and the idea was floating around even if jokingly or superficially.
