Was the Terminator the first robot of that nature in science fiction?

Question

Note: The eyes of the Terminator I think were real but he did not rely on them, although interestingly they would have blocked his electronic eyes, so I wonder how that worked.

A robot disguised as a human is not what I meant - I mean, something that is flesh and machine, but started out purely as machine, not as a human. The robots of The Second Variety were mechanical but they also may have employed real body parts and if so, it could be argued that they preceded the idea in the Terminator except Terminators used flesh purely as camouflage. The RUR creatures are not relevant here since they are not a combination of machine and flesh but rather artificially grown flesh IIRC.

"Cyborg" to me always meant an artificially enhanced organism, but importantly, originally a naturally-born organism.

I am not sure Arnold's Terminator was a cyborg. He was a robot with real flesh added, but the skin and eyes I guess were not essential and he was, it goes without saying, never human. (In later flicks, we saw it seems to me that Skynet started out by modifying humans into cyborgs.)

So my question is, was Cameron (or whoever thought of the idea) the first to come up with a robot "enhanced" with real human tissue (although presumably the tissue was cultured, not taken from humans)?

Answer 1

Metropolis. (Novel by Thea von Harbou 1925, Fritz Lang's motion picture 1927, IMDB.)

Everyone is familiar with the poster of a shiny robot female (Technically the false Maria, played by Brigitte Helm) being created inside a machine. That's from the most popular movie poster:

^{Illustration by Heinz Schulz-Neudamm. Copyright expired.}

Another, lesser known poster-version of the character (false) Maria of the Maschinenmensch (a worker class of humanoid robots) shows her with the outer layer added:

^{Artist unknown. Out of copyright.}

Images are not subject to copyright, but belong to Paramount studios.

Answer 2

Philip K. Dick had The Second Variety (a story I found absolutely creepy) was published in 1953.

Pohl and Kornbluth's Wolfsbane from 1959 I still think one of their best, and Fred Saberhagen started writing the Berserker stories in 1963 (and at least one of them I've always thought the ancestor of The Terminator movie).

But I see The Second Variety as the start, and I've never forgotten this:

The claws weren’t like other weapons. They were alive, from any practical standpoint, whether the Governments wanted to admit it or not. They were not machines. They were living

things, spinning, creeping, shaking themselves up suddenly from the gray ash and darting toward a man, climbing up him, rushing for his throat. And that was what they had been designed to do. Their job.

"They did their job well. Especially lately, with the new designs coming up. Now they repaired themselves. They were on their own ... Down below the surface automatic machinery stamped them out. Human beings stayed a long way off. It was too risky; nobody wanted to be around them. They were left to themselves. And they seemed to be doing all right. The new designs were faster, more complex. More efficient."

Answer 3

Since you are asking Science Fiction in general and not movies specifically, the German Perry Rhodan pulp series featured (first in issue 403 from 1969) the "Vario 500" robot, an egg shaped device that was constructed to disguise itself with a variety of human looking "cocoon masks" made from cultured flesh. The purpose was essentially infiltration (in early issues the robot impersonated a politician influencing a somewhat isolationist goverment to join an alliance) so a bit similar, if rather more benign than the Terminator.

Answer 4

There are also the androids of I, Mudd, the Star Trek TOS Season 2 episode that aired November 3, 1967. In an early scene a male android announces to the bridge that he is in control of the Enterprise and opens a cover in his abdomen revealing he has an electronic and mechanical interior under his human-looking skin, hair, fingernails, etc.

The story summaries I've found don't say whether the androids' skin/hair are organic or inorganic.