Most people would trace the beginning of automation to 1947, when Ford Motor Co. and Del Harder, vice president of production, applied the concept to machine processes in automobile manufacture. Del Harder coined the term, but it was used only internally at Ford to describe automatic processes. The term came into broader use in 1953 in John Diebold's seminal book, Automation, which used it in reference to information as well as mechanics processing.
But automation actually started with Nikola Tesla, who coined the word "teleautomaton," or remotely controlled automatic figure or object. In 1893, he demonstrated that he could transmit electrical energy without wires by remotely controlling a model boat's passage in a shallow water tank in Saint Louis and again a few years later in New York's Madison Square Garden.
Tesla was more than 60 years ahead of his time. After all, George Devol didn't patent his industrial robot until 1957, and the first fully successful fax machine using radio technology was not operational until 1955.
Tesla managed a remote radio device that let him send messages that moved the rudder and thus the boat in ways no one had ever seen before. Some audience members thought Tesla used mind control; others thought it was a trick; still others thought the boat had a mind under its own control. It was not a trick; the boat model still exists in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia, Tesla's original homeland.