Isaac Asimov’s “Evidence” from 1946 was about the possibility that a robot was so humanlike that he could be elected President. His 1976 “The Tercentenary Incident” was more specific, with a robot double taking the place of an assassinated President.
The theme of robot doubles taking over the world by duplicating politicians has been done to death since the 60s. Seems to me it has to be much older than that.
I know of one before 1946, a 1944 Mickey Mouse newspaper strip set in the future in which Pegleg Pete (now with two legs) is going to use his Mekka Men to replace the real leaders.
Those strips were so derivative of other gags that I can’t believe that’s original. What came before?
Just to prove your point, let me mention the MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE episode ‘Robot’, in which the dead Premier has been replaced by a flesh-and-blood impostor – but our heroes would have a hard time proving it, so they instead make it look like he’s been replaced by a robot impostor, because that’s a comparatively easy sell, right?
No, I agree; my point was, it was such a storytelling commonplace by then that the idea of a robot double standing in for the Premier was easier for them to build a con around than the fact that a lookalike was just doing an impression of his voice.
(Incidentally, how would you count that classic TWILIGHT ZONE episode where the mysterious Old Man In The Cave calling the shots for a whole community turns out to have been a computer all along?)
You’re quite right: it’s a common enough trope starting with the 1950s but early examples seem to escape me.
The separate themes are all part of early SF: robots are mistaken for humans, artificial intelligence replaces human kind, and robots influence/make politics.
J. Storer Clouston’s Button Brains from 1933 is likely one of the earlier stories where a robot is mistaken for his human counterpart. The novel is humouristic and could be either the source or an early collection of jokes that deal with malfunctioning robots.
Sydney Fowler Wright’s Automata I-III (1929) deals with intelligent machines that take over the work of humans and become more and more their replacements.
In Lester del Rey’s Helen O’Loy (1938) a man falls in love with a robot resembling a human woman - this theme is far more developed than the one you mention: It goes back to L’Eve Future by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1886), the story that popularized the term android. Though we could even go back to Olympia from E. T. A. Hoffman’s *The Sandman *(1816).
The step from purely sexual object to political influence was taken with the female looking “Futura” in Thea von Harbou’s novel from 1926, which became renown as a movie: Metropolis (1927) in which Hel/Maria incites the workers to riot and overcome the injust social order.
But Futura is still not what you’re looking for.
In *Rex *(1934) by Harl Vincent, a robotic entity uses its “marvelous mechanical brain” to rule the world but is overthrown/despairs before it is able to remake man in the image of robots. Not a match either - but closer to the trope that became so popular later.
Bleiler lists dozens of stories under the classification Robot, but doesn’t break out any one featuring a deliberate replacement. Misunderstandings go way back, and I agree that it all starts with Hoffmann with renewed interest in the theme after Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann debuted in 1881.
The specific plot of replacement of leaders by robots for the purpose of ruling the world is not anything I can find.
However, it occurs to me that Bill Walsh, the Mickey Mouse writer, must have been influenced by Charlie Chaplin imitating Hitler in The Great Dictator only four years earlier. That theme goes back to The Man in the Iron Mask and The Prince and The Pauper. A 1932 film, The Phantom President, has a dull candidate replaced by a charismatic showman in public.
A short hop from there to a constructing a perfect double. It still bothers me that Bill Walsh, of all people, was the one to make it. Originality wasn’t one of his strong points.