Historedia
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Publication of Darwin among the Machines

When
13 June 1863
Where
The Press newspaper office
Part of
Darwin among the Machines published

Samuel Butler published a letter titled 'Darwin among the Machines' in The Press, Christchurch, on 13 June 1863, signed as Cellarius.

The letter proposed that machines were a kind of 'mechanical life' undergoing constant evolution, potentially supplanting humans as the dominant species. This publication in The Press marked the initial appearance of these ideas, which Butler later developed into The Book of the Machines.

Sources

  1. Darwin among the Machines Wikipedia, revision of 2026-10-04
  2. The Press Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-01

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.