1500 To 1800
Between 1500 and 1800, many automatons were built including ones capable of acting, drawing, flying, and playing music; several mechanical calculators were also built in this time period, some of the most famous ones are Wilhelm Schickard's "Calculating Clock", Blaise Pascal's "Pascaline", and the "Leibniz Stepped Drum", by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In 1533, Johannes Müller von Königsberg created an automaton eagle and fly made of iron; both could fly. John Dee is also famous for creating a wooden beetle, capable of flying.
Some of the most famous works of the period were created by Jacques de Vaucanson in 1737, including an automaton flute player, tambourine player, and his most famous work, "The Digesting Duck". Vaucanson's duck was powered by weights and was capable of imitating a real duck by flapping its wings (over 400 parts were in each of the wings alone), eat grain, digest it, and defecate by excreting matter stored in a hidden compartment.
John Kay invented his "flying shuttle" in 1733, and the "Spinning Jenny" was invented in 1764 by James Hargreaves, each radically increasing the speed of production in the weaving and spinning industries respectively. The Spinning Jenny is hand-powered and requires a skilled operator; Samuel Crompton's Spinning Mule first developed in 1779 is a fully automated power driven spinning machine capable of spinning hundreds of threads at once.
Richard Arkwright built a water powered weaving machine, and factory around it in 1781, starting the Industrial Revolution.
The Japanese craftsman Hisashige Tanaka, known as "Japan's Edison", created an array of extremely complex mechanical toys, some of which were capable of serving tea, firing arrows drawn from a quiver, or even painting a Japanese kanji character. The landmark text Karakuri Zui (Illustrated Machinery) was published in 1796.
By 1800, cloth production was completely automated. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution the idea of automata began to be applied to industry, as cost and time saving devices.
==1801 to 2011 ==
Improvements in the weaving industry had led to large amounts of automation, and the idea of programmable machines became popular with Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine Babbage conceived his Analytical Engine as a replacement for his uncompleted Difference Engine; this larger, more complex device would be able to perform multiple operations, and would be operated by punch cards. Construction of the Analytical Engine was never completed; work was begun in 1833. However, Ada Lovelace's work on the project has resulted in her being credited as the first computer programmer.
In literature, around this time period, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, about a monster consisting of dead flesh being brought to life by electricity.
In 1837, the story of the Golem of Prague, a humanoid artificial intelligence activated by inscribing Hebrew letters on its forehead, based on George Boole invented a new type of symbolic logic in 1847 which was instrumental to the creation of computers and robots.
In 1898 Nikola Tesla publicly demonstrated a radio-controlled (teleoperated) boat, similar to a modern ROV. Based on his patents U.S. Patent 613,809, U.S. Patent 723,188 and U.S. Patent 725,605 for "teleautomation", Tesla hoped to develop the wireless torpedo into a weapon system for the US Navy (Cheney 1989).
Read more about this topic: History Of Robots