thirteenth century
How to Teach A Robot to Flirt
There have been machines that move themselves for millennia. In the first century C.E., the Greek mathematician Hero of Alexandria designed dolls that could be used to act out miniature theatrical scenes. The original treatises he wrote about these automata were lost to history. But a group of Sicilian scholars discovered Arabic translations in the thirteenth century. Translating into Latin, the monks coined a new term for automata that looked human: androïdes, from andros, the Greek word for "man."