"An automaton is a machine that contains its own principle of motion. This Cartesian definition was advanced by Rabelais when, in Gargantua, he introduced the word "automate" into the French language: "and contrived a thousand little automatory engines, that is to say, moving of themselves." The English retained the Greek form "automaton" until its evocative power was supplanted by the new term "robot," coined in 1924 by the Czech writer, Karel Capek. By then, however, the context had changed: the object itself was no longer the most important thing, at least from the technical point of view (although it continued to fascinate artists more than ever); rather, it was how the machines worked that mattered, their function, machines working en masse in industry and later in computing. The French adopted the term "automation, " rather than keeping ther own, more precise, "automatization," and today the word designates a whole technological world, governed by this principle. Even cybernetic or computer definitions of contemporary machines (like threshold automata, or semirecursive automata), which may be applied to mathematical entities far removed from the original machine, do not add anything to the main definition."

Jean-Claude Beaune

Beaune, Jean-Claude. "The Classical Age of Automata: An Impressionistic Survey from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century". Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One ed. Michel Feher et al. New York: Zone, 1989. 431 - 480.