In 1921 Karel Čapek released his theatre play "R.U.R." Where a company builds artificial humans to serve normal humans and help ease the workload in society. As another anon said above this is where the word Robot comes from, he coined it as the name of this race of artificial humans. However, these "Robots" are actually organic so they are more like a perfect android from what I understand, like Replicants I imagine.

In 1927 Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou release Metropolis, the rest is history. I often see Manschinenmensch regarded as the first modern robot as we know them today ever in fiction and though I can't confirm if it is I can't deny it either because I can't find any other proper *real* robot that's older than her.

So everytime you see all of these wonderful waifus in this thread and whoever else, and everytime you see a cute riot police killer bot shooting random reporters in some 20 years from now, remember, all of them -all of them- exist thanks to Charles Babbage's genius and his beautiful Difference engine, the robotic tiktaalik. She's a very special lady to me and she shouldn't be forgotten.