Nikola Tesla and Robotics in the 19th century

In the late 1890s, Nikola Tesla patented the remote control boat by which he started his work in robotics. Onlookers at the 1898 Electrical Exhibition at MadisonSquare were stunned, but Nikola Tesla simply explained: 

"At present we suffer from the derangement of our civilization because we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age. The solution of our problems does not lie in destroying but in mastering the machine. Innumerable activities still performed by human hands today will be performed by automatons. At this very moment, scientists working in the laboratories of American universities are attempting to create what has been described as a ” thinking machine.” I anticipated this development.I actually constructed ”robots”. Today the robot is an accepted fact, but the principle has not been pushed far enough. In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place that slave labor occupied in ancient civilization. There is no reason at all why most of this should not come to pass in less than a century, freeing mankind to pursue its higher aspirations."