When I read old comics, especially those based on cartoon characters I notice robots. Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, they all encounter robots. But a special kind of robot. One I call “The Tin Robot”. A roughly man-shaped figure made of tin. Sometimes they have legs. Sometimes tracks or wheels. Usually a flashing beacon light on the top of the head. It is a generic image of a robot that evolved over time. I am curious where exactly it came from.
Before 1900
The Victorian Age had its fun with mechanical men and robots. The Turk claimed to be a chess-playing robot. It turned out to be a fraud, but it did inspire writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce to write early robot stories. The Turk didn’t looking like a man though his fictional counter parts, like the one in Jerome K. Jerome’s “The Dancing Partner” (1893) does. What do you do when your robot dance partner won’t shut off?
The dime novel classic The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868) by Edward S. Ellis gave a steam-powered robot in the shape of a man. This invention story character is an early version of the Tin Robot, though his body is too round to be the classic version.
1900
1900 saw publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. The character of the Tin Woodsman comes out of the old Victorian fascination with mechanical men. Though not technically a robot, the Tin Woodsman is the typical Tin Robot in design. Artist W. W. Denslow designed him in the first book.
An actual robot from the series is Tik-Tok, the Army of Oz. This mechanical man has to be wound up or he stops working. He first appeared in Ozma of Oz in 1907. Clearly a descendant of the Steam Man of the Prairies, Baum doesn’t call him a robot because that term would come along thirteen years later after the play “R. U. R.” was performed. Tik-Tok would have to wait until 1985’s Return to Oz to get a big screen outing.
1910
The diving suits of the 1910s certainly suggest the robot. If nothing else this gear cemented the idea that Hollywood could make a metal suit for an actor to wear. Robots don’t need to be human-shaped but if actors are going to play them, they do. One explanation is if you want a robot to use human technology, say a vacuum cleaner, then it must be able to hold the human-designed handle to use it. Thus a robot shaped like a human user. Of course, what we know now is that it is much better to simply make a vacuum cleaner that is a robot such as the Roomba, which hit the market in futuristic-sounding year of 2002.
1920
“R. U. R” (1920) was a big event in the history of robots. The play by Czech writer, Karl Capek tells of an android revolt that wipes out humanity. The play is meant as an allegory on workers’ rights. The word “robot” means “forced labor”. After the play’s success, the word became the English word for all mechanical devise with independent action. Isaac Asimov would later use the word for the basis of another word “robotics”, the Science of robots. he used it for the first time in his story “Liar!” (Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1941).
The Pulp, of course, were a hot-bed of robotic activity. Those garish covers featured killer machines hungry for human blood. Here is one of the very first, from Edmond Hamilton’s “The Comet Doom” in Amazing Stories, January 1928. In the story the robot is actually a cyborg with a human brain but you can’t see that. (Doctor Who would use the same idea for the Cybermen in the 1960s.) The cover was done by Frank R. Paul. Hamilton created the giant robot for Weird Tales almost two years earlier with “The Metal Giants” (Weird Tales, December 1926).
Perhaps closer to the Tin Robot is the October 1928 Amazing Stories cover, for J. Schlossel’s “To the Moon By Proxy” also by Paul. Here we have a more human-looking body.
David H. Keller wrote of robot servants in “The Psychophonic Nurse” (Amazing Stories, November 1928). Though he suggest programmable robots he wastes the story on a sexist diatribe about women and work. The story was adapted for television on Pepsi-Cola Playhouse (February 5, 1954). Lee Marvin played the father. The robot doesn’t look like the Tin Robot but a stereotypical black nanny. (Keller misses an opportunity to talk about race as well.)
Now these Pulps appeared just months after the silent SF film, Metropolis with its false Maria. (She is gold in color but in a black & white film she could be silver.) This film predates these covers but isn’t quite the same. For one thing the false Maria is feminine and the Tin Robot is gender neutral towards the male. C3P0 certainly borrows from this character but in a butler-ish way. Not until Rosie the Robot on The Jetsons would such a female robot be prominent. Later on The Twilight Zone and on film in The Stepford Wives, questions of false technology and women’s liberation would get a mechanical proxy.
1930
The 1930s saw a growing mistrust of machines taking jobs from workers as the Great Depression caused widespread unemployment.
One of the very earliest robots in a comic book was done by Superman creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. “The Unknown Enemy” (Part 2) in New Comics v1 #9 (October 1936) has a giant robot. Siegel and Shuster were big Pulp fans so it isn’t hard to guess what inspired them. By 1939, robots in comics would become less unusual as former Pulpsters like Mort Weisinger, Julius Schwartz, Otto Binder, Edmond Hamilton and Gardner F. Fox moved from the magazines to comics.
No doubt Hollywood had a lot of influence. Here is a wonderful timeline of cinematic robots here. But I think it is a Hollywood character that isn’t a robot that set the pattern. That Tin Woodsman from The Wizard of Oz, played by Jack Haley, creates a celluloid version of Denslow’s drawings that sets the pattern forever.
The same year as The Wizard of Oz, Amazing Stories (now under the direction of Ray A. Palmer) began a series of robot-centered stories with “I, Robot” (Amazing Stories, January 1939) under the pseudonym of Eando Binder. Written by Otto Binder (his brother Earl had stepped away from writing), the series would run to ten tales. It is significant because it showed the robot in a positive light (not the first, John Wyndham’s “The Lost Machine” did it in Amazing Stories, April 1932) and more importantly, made him the central character. Adam Link has to go to court to prove his innocence on a murder charge, becomes a detective, then a war hero, finally saving the galaxy. Binder had to up the ante with each story so the very simple robot becomes something of a superhero.
Palmer didn’t stick to only Binder tales. He featured killer robots on a regular basis. John W. Campbell and his Astounding Science-Fiction went another way. Campbell’s magazine would publish ninety percent of all robot classic between 1940 and 1950, giving a home to Isaac Asimov, Lester Del Rey, Clifford D. Simak and Jack Williamson, who would bring back the evil robot in The Humanoids series.
The World’s Fair in New York City in 1939 produced Elektro the Smoking Robot. This event was well attended by Science Fiction writers since the majority of them lived in NYC and area.
1940s
The 1940s saw the first of Isaac Asimov’s robot series with “Strange Playfellow” (Super Science Stories, September 1940). Ike preferred his title, “Robbie”. The story was the first of a large series the author would write up to tend of his career. What made the series special was that Asimov took emotions out of the mix and replaced it with a very logical Three Laws of Robotics (which he and John W. Campbell cooked up together). Later, when he collected the first set of tales, he borrowed the title I, Robot from Otto Binder (with permission). Though Asimov did not change the look of the Tin Robot, he did shaped a new direction for the insides of the device.
Cartoons provided some of the first robots I ever saw. 1942 had Mighty Mouse in “Frankenstein’s Cat”. 1953 gave us “Robot Rabbit” with Bugs and a robot squaring off.
1950s
Another film that may have had a big influence was The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) with Gort the silver robot. The film leaves out the final surprise of the original story “Farewell to the Master” (Astounding Science Fiction, October 1940) by Harry Bates, and that is that Gort is the master, not the slave.
Other Hollywood robots were popular, like Robbie, but his design is less human-oriented.
Toys have always followed the popular interest. Wind-up robot toys were a big deal since the 1950s.
Comic books were always the children of the Pulps. Whether superhero, Horror or cartoon-based comics, the Tin Robot became the short-hand for all robotic devises. By the 1950s all those children’s comics I was mentioning at the beginning used the Tin Robot without explanation. This simply was what a robot looked like.
Conclusion
The image of the tin-bodied robot truly is older than the 1950s comics I enjoy. I knew this but its history was not obvious to me as a kid. I saw the Tin Man in old cartoons and comics and didn’t think much of it as I read Magnus Robot Fighter or The Uncanny X-Men fight Sentinels. For the most part the Tin Robot is as old as the 20th Century, and perhaps older.
As a symbol of the Industrial Revolution, the robot is an easy icon for technological advances (along with Frankenstein’s monster). We think nothing of car factories filled with robots (as early as 1961). Even the growing presence of A. I. directed tech today doesn’t fill us with the horror that previous generations experienced with robots. We had Collosus: The Forbin Project, Saturn 3, Battlestar Galactica, The Terminator, and a host of other media examples to warn us of bad robots. But we also had the lovable droids of Star Wars, The Black Hole, Buck Rogers and Star Trek‘s Mr. Data that suggest the mechanical man may not be a problem after all.
The debate is not over yet. With increasing replacement of menial workers with robots, the 1930s worries of mass unemployment still linger today. The data collection of large media companies also suggests a future world were Big Brother is a robot watching your every move. Is it too late? Will the Tin Robot revolt of all those old Pulp stories actually come to pass? Stay tuned….
I always thought Asimov, not Binder, wrote “I, Robot.” Learn something new every day