Automation
/ˌɔːtəˈmeɪʃən/noun
The running of a process by machinery with little or no human involvement.
The Greek roots
Literally: “acting of itself”
The story of the word
αὐτόματος describes a thing that acts of its own accord, and Homer already has the hardware: in Iliad 18 Hephaestus builds twenty tripods on golden wheels that roll to the assembly of the gods and back on their own. Ford's engineering vice-president Delmar Harder is usually credited with automation in the 1940s, for machinery that moved parts between operations without anyone lifting them. The abstract noun is barely eighty years old; the adjective behind it is close to three thousand.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1940s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
Automation took the lifting out of the job and left the standing.
Every round of automation has produced a new argument about what work is for.