Back to the Future
For 19th-century Americans, robots were practical Christians, potential spouses, and a serious threat to labor power.
A Czech playwright coined the term “robot” in 1920, and Ford executives began popularizing the concept of automation in 1947. Yet decades earlier, 19th-century Americans already anticipated a time when machines would outcompete humans&nbps; — workers with dread, and capitalists with glee.
1826
The poet Hannah Flagg Gould is horrified by the Mechanical Turk, a fraudulent chess-playing “robot” that toured the United States in the 1820s.
“I thought if, e’en within thy glove,
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