Where does the word 'android' come from?

When people in 2019 talk about androids, they might mean a humanlike robot in a laboratory, a character in a science fiction film, or the name of a phone operating system. The word itself is much older than any of these. Its modern meaning, a machine built to look and act like a human being, was spread by a French novel published in 1886: L'Ève future by Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, known in English as Tomorrow's Eve or The Future Eve.

In the novel, an inventor builds an artificial woman powered by electricity and gives her a recorded human voice. He calls her an Andréide, and the book's popularity helped carry the term into the vocabulary of fiction and, eventually, of robotics.

The word before the novel

"Android" did not start with Villiers. The Oxford English Dictionary traces its earliest recorded use in English, as "Androides," to Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia of 1728, which used it for a mechanical man that the medieval scholar Albertus Magnus was said to have built. By the late 1700s, elaborate humanlike automatons, called androides, were shown to paying audiences in exhibition halls. In the United States the word turns up in patents from 1863 for small humanlike toys.

What Villiers added was a new meaning. His android is not a clockwork curiosity that repeats one trick. It is meant to be a convincing, lifelike companion, indistinguishable at first sight from a real person. That is the sense the word carries in science fiction today.

What happens in the novel

Villiers began the book in 1878, and an earlier version appeared in 1880 under the title L'Ève nouvelle. The full novel was published in Paris in 1886 by M. de Brunhoff.

The hero is Thomas Edison, the real American inventor of the phonograph, working in his laboratory at Menlo Park. Villiers opens with a note to the reader explaining that this Edison is not the living engineer but the legend that had grown around him, the "Wizard of Menlo Park." He compares this to Goethe writing about Faust, and says his Edison's character, home and theories are meant to differ from reality.

In the story, Edison's friend Lord Ewald, who once saved his life, arrives in despair. He loves Alicia Clary, a woman he finds physically perfect but, in his eyes, empty of mind and feeling. Edison offers a solution: he has built an artificial woman named Hadaly, and he will give her Alicia's exact appearance and voice. Over the following weeks Edison copies Alicia's likeness and records her voice. Ewald meets the finished android and is moved. She reveals to him that she has been given a spirit by Sowana, a mysterious helper of Edison's. Ewald sets off home with her, but the ship carrying her sinks and she is destroyed.

How Hadaly is supposed to work

Much of the book is a long tour of Hadaly's insides, in the spirit of an inventor showing off a prototype. Here are some of the parts Edison describes, with a modern comparison.

Part of Hadaly	How the novel explains it	A 2019 comparison
Skin and arm	A flexible material over an ivory bone, warmed by electric wiring laid out like nerves and veins	Silicone skin on humanoid robots
Power	Electricity, which Edison calls the vital force that gives her the illusion of life	Batteries and motors
Voice	Two golden phonographs serving as her lungs, holding recordings of Alicia's voice	Synthetic voices built from recorded human speech
Words	Speeches and songs recorded in advance by the real Alicia, who does not know what they are for	Scripted replies in simple chatbots

When Ewald first touches the arm and asks what it is, Edison answers with a phrase that defines the idea: "Une Imitation-Humaine, si vous voulez," a human imitation, if you like. His worry, he says, is not that the copy will be too crude, but that it might physically surpass the original.

Try it: Look at the last column of the table. For one item, write down what a modern system can do that Hadaly could not, and one thing the novel imagines that is still out of reach in 2019.

Why it matters

L'Ève future is a strange book: part science fiction, part philosophical fable, and a Symbolist novel that critics also count among the key texts of the French Decadent movement. Critics have praised its literary daring and also condemned its open contempt for women; the whole plot rests on the idea that a real woman can be improved by replacing her with a machine. Both reactions are part of its history.

The novel reached English readers slowly. A translation ran as a serial in an American pulp magazine in 1926 and 1927, and a translation titled Tomorrow's Eve appeared in 1982. Meanwhile the word it had popularized traveled on its own: "android" entered English-language pulp science fiction in the 1930s and 1940s, and from there the wider culture.

What does Tomorrow's Eve say about machines that imitate people?

The novel's central question is not whether a machine can think, but whether a convincing imitation of a person is enough. Ewald falls for Hadaly precisely because she gives back a perfect surface with none of the friction of a real human being. Villiers suggests that this is both the appeal and the danger of an artificial companion.

That question is alive in 2019. Robotics labs, such as Hiroshi Ishiguro's group at Osaka University, have built strikingly lifelike androids. Voice assistants answer in friendly human voices, and chatbots are designed to sound like a person on the other end. Each raises Villiers's question in a new form: when a machine is built to resemble us, what are we actually responding to, the machine or the person we imagine behind it?