One of the earliest robot-like creations in fiction was “The Steam Man,” introduced in Edward S. Ellis’s 1868 dime novel - The Steam Man of the Prairies.
This tale features a 10-foot-tall steam-powered man invented by a boy prodigy, used to pull a carriage across the American plains. The story was based on an actual historical invention - the Steam Man of Newark by Zadoc P. Dederick with **Isaac Grass** as the engineer.
# The Huge Hunter; OR, The Steam Man of the Prairies. (1868)
by EDWARD S. ELLIS
The Steam Man of the Prairies. (1868) by EDWARD S. ELLIS is the earliest text I can find of a mechanical robot. Powered by steam, and driven by a human, it was not (yet) the automaton that we are now familiar with.
The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), by Edward S. Ellis is a dime-novel of a mechanical proto-robot - wikimedia 
1. Terror of the Prairies 1. Handle Me Gently 1. A Genius 1. Trapper and the Artisan 1. On The Yellowstone 1. The Miners 1. On His Travels 1. Indians 1. Steam Man Hunter 1. Wolf Ravine 1. On a Buffalo Hunt 1. The Grizzly Bear 1. An Appalling Danger 1. The Huge Hunter 1. Attack in the Ravine 1. The Repulse 1. Homeward Bound 1. The Encampment 1. The Doings of a Night 1. Concluding Catastrophe
Ellis’s “steam man” was directly inspired by a real invention of the same year: Zadoc Dederick’s steam-powered mechanical man. Dederick’s 7½-foot Steam Man of Newark was a quarter-ton iron man run by a 4-horsepower engine, complete with jointed iron legs, a furnace in its belly, and a stovepipe hat as its smokestack.
Dressed in gentlemanly attire (gloves, jacket, and mustache), Dederick’s invention could pull a rickshaw or wagon at will. Although the real Steam Man was soon dismissed as a hoax or “grievous humbug” by 1869, its legacy was secured in Ellis’s popular adventure story.
The Steam Man of the Prairies is often cited as the first American science fiction dime novel, and by dramatizing Dederick’s invention so vividly (even down to the riveted stovepipe hat), Ellis helped lay groundwork for the Edisonade genre of boy inventors and for modern sci-fi itself.
This mechanical man – half science fact, half fiction – stands as a 19th-century vision of a “robot” before the word robot existed.
# See
- Dime-novel mechanical man adventure (proto-robot) - Edward S. Ellis — The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868) 
# Assets
pg7506-h