Did a Steam-Powered Robot Really Walk Down the Street in 1868?

In early 1868, excited newspapers across America rippled out the claim that a young New Jersey inventor named Zadock Dederick “has invented a man that, moved by steam, will perform some of the most important functions of humanity.” By March, the news had become so widespread, and the idea so tantalizing, that New Yorkers lined down Broadway for the chance to see the marvel for themselves.

Inventor Zadock Dederick (sometimes spelled Zadoc), was a machinist and patternmaker in his early 20s, who had spent years working on the prototype of a mechanical man. He set up shop in a room across the street from the remains of P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in Lower Manhattan, which had so recently burned down that curious New Yorkers were still coming to the site to rubberneck over the ruins. Admission to his workshop was 25 cents.

Inside, the Steam Man was set up for visitors. He resembled a sort of rotund cyborg Monopoly man with a steam whistle in his mouth, engines concealed beneath his barrel chest and a literal stovepipe hat for a smokestack. The quarter-ton figure, made largely of metal, was operated by a four-horsepower steam engine and could be attached to a rickshaw or wagon. Double-jointed legs allowed for maneuverability, and the whole affair was polished off with gentlemanly looks—gloved hands, a handsome jacket and a smooth white enameled face with a sizeable mustache.

The humanoid disguise was entertaining, to be sure, but it was also functional. Dederick hoped his invention would be used for public transportation and labor, and didn’t want a metal beast scaring horses. Together, the Steam Man and carriage weighed in at a ton, and were said to cost $3,000 (more than $70,000 in 2025).

Dederick had spent years with his partner Isaac Grass in conceiving, building and fine-tuning the mechanism. The automaton came to be known as the Steam Man of Newark, though workmen nicknamed it Daniel Lambert after an 18th-century British jailer and sometime sideshow attraction, who weighed more than 700 pounds.

The only criticism the New York Express could levy about the contraption was that, upon their viewing, “At this early hour in the morning he was rather in dishabille, and minus his pants."

The Steam Man was not simply an amusement. Fans of the innovation suggested the machine could replace horses altogether. An 1868 entry in The Friend: A Religious and Literary Journal marveled that the invention could “walk or run, as he is bid, in any direction, and at almost any rate of speed, drawing after him a load whose weight would tax the strength of three stout draft horses.”

In an age of rapid industrialization, expansion and immigration, the Steam Man was a visible signal of change. “Twenty pounds of steam will set the man in motion,” Dederick was quoted in The St. Louis Republic, “and 20 cents worth of coal will work him for a day.” A tireless worker stronger than men and horses not only threatened the conventional labor force to the benefit of wealthy owners, it made uncomfortable connections to enslavement.

Responses to the Steam Man were all over the map. The scientific establishment urged patience, with Scientific American magazine stating that “we learn that, although an invention of the kind is in progress, it is far from being perfected.” A journalist in The Flag Of Our Union called Dederick a visionary on the order of “a new Frankenstein,” and another in The American Artisan and Patent Record journal thought the whole thing was pretty funny: “Five women write, ordering cast-iron husbands and one gentleman sends for a wife.”

As a young inventor, Dederick played directly into romantic ideas of the self-made American man—of the potential for genius and profit within every common citizen. It was hard, too, not to consider the skeleton of Barnum’s museum across the street from Dederick’s gallery. For more than two decades, Barnum and other American cultural figures had played with “humbug” entertainments that invited spectators to decide for their “sovereign selves” if something was real or fake.

“Truth was not necessarily Barnum’s endgame,” says Kathleen Maher, executive director of the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Connecticut. “He valued giving people the opportunity to engage with 'humbug' on their own terms. For him, the truth was often less important than the chance to explore, wonder and think independently—a kind of ‘self-proclaimed democracy’ in 19th-century America.”

Was Dederick's machine really meant to be effective or mostly to amuse through suggestion of futuristic possibility? In the end, it is hard to know. Papers covering the fad in 1868 comment that his choice of real estate capitalized on the “fire excitement” at Barnum’s. They also point out that, for all the talk about the Steam Man pulling wagons on the bumpiest cobblestones, there was always something preventing a full demonstration—whether it was a small room or the objections of the local insurance company.

In the end, the Steam Man of Newark had a short lifetime. Barely a year after its celebrated debut, the New Jersey paper Monmouth Democrat called the contraption a “grievous humbug,” and said it had recently been put up for sale. The machine would nonetheless have a tremendous legacy—just not perhaps the one Dederick intended. In the 1860s, with rising literacy rates, cheap printing, the globalization of American identity and the increasing popularity of dime novels, the Steam Man was just the thing for an adventure story.

Author Edward Ellis borrowed Dederick’s invention, right down to the riveted stovepipe hat and plucky boy inventors, and in 1868 wrote Steam Man of the Prairies. It had a significant impact on speculative fiction writing, steampunk culture and the concept of the Edisonade—a genre about young, ingenious inventors and their inventions. By dramatizing Dederick’s invention, Ellis helped lay the groundwork for modern science fiction.