Tripod

In the eighteenth book of the Iliad, the sea-goddess Thetis climbs to Olympus to beg new armour for her son Achilles, and finds Hephaestus at his bellows, sweating over a commission of his own: twenty tripods to stand along the walls of his house. Under each one he has set golden wheels, so that they can roll of their own accord to the gathering of the gods and then roll home again, a wonder to see. Homer's word for “of their own accord” is automatoi, the root of our automaton.

They are not quite finished. The elaborate handles have yet to be fitted, and when Thetis arrives the god is hammering in the rivets. It is a lovely detail: some of the earliest self-moving machines in literature are a work in progress, and their inventor is still fiddling with the fittings.

About four centuries later, Aristotle reached for the same tripods in the Politics. If every tool could do its own work when ordered, or by anticipating what was wanted, like the statues of Daedalus or the tripods of Hephaestus, then master craftsmen would need no assistants and masters no slaves. It is one of the earliest arguments about what automation would do to human labour, and it was made about a myth.