His robot was hijacked to mean a mechanical man with gears and wires inside and he objected to that. I'm thinking of course that the public only had experience with these things — or perhaps this was another fear of the time, the mechanization of jobs, and so the robot became the perfect avatar for this fear and so evolved.

But surely the idea of a mechanical man predates the term, robot. Automatons? Or is the distinction that people understood automatons as stationary, a parkour toy, while the robot was a next level thing capable of traveling. Or was the distinction that a robot might have a mechanical brain and so could carry out wanton destruction on it's own?

And was all this tied in with some creeping horror modern society saw in the machinery of The Great War?