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Well, there was Boilerplate

Robots go back farther than that. Never heard of Steam Man?

Oh, wait. It's not April 1 yet.

Boilerplate is older than that.

Most amazing of them all-
http://www.bigredhair.com/boilerplate.html/

http://www.bigredhair.com/boilerplate/index.html

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Hell, Frank Read did this in the 1800s.

Hi. I'm Troy McClure. You might remember me from such classical music meets robotics films as "The 500 Diodes of Dr T" and "Metal Maestro: The Amazing Story of Ludwig Von Boilerplate"

3 more engines.

This plane (if possable) would have a very high glide ratio, so even if it crashes, unless it's a catastrophic failure, it could be a very soft crash landing.

To me this sounds like some intresting scifi, from a wild imagination, but not very well thought out. I'm shure that there will be something like this eventually, but most likeley not too soon.

The vehicle is really just a durigable with wings, I think that lighter than air flight has a potential to be come a really big thing in the next century, and that that is the angle to push, not the fuel-less flight aspect. Imagine taking an air cruise.

I'm sure that everyone reading the Boilerplate story (about the would-be soldier, scout, mechanical marvel-man, etc...) wondered what kind of magic pills the guy who wrote it was taking since clearly a steam-powered man never did anything he claims it did.

Some more (dis)proof is provided for those who couldn't find that magic pill. Mechanical soldier, my shiny metal ass!

Finally the revisionist conspiracy has been exposed! Their shameless attempts at hiding the existence of BoilerPlate will no longer work. At last the world can see BoilerPlate posing with Pancho Villa, instead of only seeing the revisionist version of the picture, where BoilerPlate has been replaced by some nameless revolutionary. Kinda makes one wonder if those US soldiers in Iraq aren't actually BoilerPlate Mark 10's.

When Asimov started writing about robots, there was already a sizable literature regarding same going back over at least half a century prior. Most notably (at least to Americans) would be Frank Baum's Tin-Man and other mechanical men. That puts the idea into the public domain. ;)

I nominate Steam Man.

When Professor Campion unveiled Boilerplate in 1893, the concept of a mechanical man was not a new one. Edward S. Ellis, in 1865, wrote about a prodigy that constructed a non-sentient automaton called the Steam Man. At the time, it was considered to be nothing more than an elaborate novelty item, like Boilerplate. Stories of its feats were relegated to the tabloids and "Edisonades." In the account entitled Steam Man of the Prairies (the first of several such publications), Johnny Brainerd, a teenage dwarf, invented "a man that shall go by steam." Here is how it was described: This is a later, cruder version