I have some old newspapers in the garage I occasionally go through that certainly might qualify but somebody is tearing down a garage in an older area of Calgary and among other things found a punch of newspapers and magazines nailed in-between the roof rafters as insulation, many of them from the WW2 era. Some people unfamiliar with the V1 & V2 would probably find the one headline from the Chicago Sun quite puzzling:
“Heaviest Robot Raid on England”.
Almost sounds like something from the future. I’ve never read about the V1 & V2 being referred to as robots. They don’t seem to technically qualify as being such. Article in the link below.
The battle for Cherbourg was over by late June 1944, so this article would have been about the V1 only (the V2 came in September, and were described as “gas main explosions” for some weeks thereafter).
You can see why they would have referred to a pilotless plane as a robot (fits better in a headline, for one thing).
“Headless Body in Topless Bar” - New York Post, April 15, 1983.
I was surprised by the publication date when I went to look it up. It sounded like something from the late 40s or 50s.
The late, unlamented St. Louis Sun came up with one brilliant headline during its short life. (The Sun is so unlamented that I can’t even find it on teh Interwebz.) However, a newspaper in Orlando picked up the story and the headline about a cocktail waitress who was bitten by a patron.
Robot was used for dozens of devices that operated automatically. Even traffic lights were sometimes called robots. By the time of the war using robot for these autonomous devices was natural. I’ve found the use of robot bombs, robot planes, robot tanks, and robot ships.
Remember, there were no real world robots at the time. A couple of figures of limited movements and the ability to “talk” using recordings got a lot of attention, but they were purely showpieces for publicity.
I’d say more that language has moved on and left the world of non-computerized electromechanical cybernetics in the dust; if you define a robot as Asimov did, a computer that can move itself around, then a V-2 isn’t a robot by the modern understanding of computer as a stored-program device, but it’s a cybernetic device in that it incorporates a feedback loop and can (in theory) control its own operation to some extent.
But in the 1940s, a computer was still a person who computed numbers, to the point some early computers had -AC names, for “Automatic Computer” as opposed to, say, an adding machine a human had to constantly operate.
I would argue that the nature of the movements and the ability to “talk” are irrelevant to whether something is a “robot”. The essential elements of a “robot”, as I understand the term, are that it can react in some reasonable way to unpredicted changes in its environment, and the nature of its reactions can be changed. A missile might qualify as such if, for instance, its targeting parameters can be reset, and it can maintain its targeting even in the face of unexpected weather conditions between the launch site and target. I don’t know if the V1 and V2 could do that.
As for remarkable headlines, I can think of two offhand. First the Chicago newspaper that headlined the Dewey landslide. Second the NY paper that ran the headline, “Ford to City, Drop Dead”. That was during their fiscal crisis in the mid 1970s.
There was supposedly a local paper article years ago that said “Boring Man Drowns in Drain.” Boring and Drain being two towns in Oregon. Probably apocryphal, but amusing.
Only one I can remember came from 1963 (I was 10 at the time) as the World Series (when baseball was still the most important sport in America) started with the Dodgers beating the Yankees 5-2. The Akron Beacon Journal’s sport section headlined “Koufax Sizzles, Ford Fizzles; Dodgers Lead”.
Have no idea why I remember that, but it’s stuck in my mind then and is still there 55 years later.
The one that I remember best (except of course “JAPS BOMB PEARL HARBOR”) is one I read about years ago in a book by H. Allen Smith, writing about his days with a local newspaper in darkest Southern Illinois.
This one was written by a young lady, a new headline writer writing about a local wedding, and went, “COCKBURNS OFF ON WEDDING TRIP”.
Mr. Smith said she had no interest whatsoever in discussing anything about this after the headline appeared.
