Wikipedia says:
Wrong. Arthur C. Clarke was using the term in 1962.
I can’t trace it back further, though. Brave New Words, the science fiction dictionary, doesn’t list it. Neither does the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. The word itself is fairly common in a variety of scientific contexts, but not as a magic box that produces whatever you need from raw materials.
Was the word coined by Clarke? Anybody know of an earlier use?
The earliest use of the word found by Google Books Ngram Viewer is in 1924, but I don’t know how to get details, so I don’t know whether it was science fiction or some other context.
Not quite the same, but I recall a reference in a Heinlein story to a “replicating pantograph”, from which it would be a short step to calling it a “replicator”. I think it was either in Waldo (1942) or Door into Summer (1957).
Found it. It’s on page 159 of A History of Rutger’s College, 1766-1924. It’s pretty clearly not used in the SF sense; it’s referring to a person as the replicator in question.
“Mr. Cole, respondent, — Mr. Freeman, opponent, — Mr. Hardenbergh, replicator. 6. Musick. 7. An oration in English, upon the improvement of time, by John Jackson. 8. The degree of Bachelor of Arts was conferred on the candidates, viz.”
(The bottom of the page you linked has Google Book search links. If you narrow the ngram window, you can get searches for particular years.)
Beat me to the reference, but it was in “Gulf” (1949).
"It played hob with the notion of entropy - one put in “sausage,” one got out “pig.”
Yep. That’s how I knew it was commonly used in other senses.
The “replicating pantograph” is from “Waldo.” Pantographs go way back in history. The idea of replicating is ancient.
It’s only the use of Replicator for magic box whose origin is obscure.
I don’t recall that phrase being used in “Waldo”; maybe in a passing reference to the patent term for his teleoperated manipulators. In “Gulf” I am pretty sure the term is used for a “magic box” that will replicate anything placed inside it. Interesting evolution if the terms are indeed the same.
I was in the telepresence industry ca. 2000 and no one had heard of the term “waldo,” BTW. I think it is exclusively a NASAgeek term, not an industrial one.
When I use Google book search I find “replicating pantograph” only in “To Sail Beyond the Sunset”
I can’t make anything come up from “Gulf” or Assignment in Eternity, so I suspect if it’s Googleized, it’s not on line.
You have to be careful using the Google Books n-gram search. Sometimes it doesn’t really get the word you want. Sometimes it gets the word, but with a different sense* Certainly there are references to “replicator”, but they don’t mean what Star Trek (and Arthur C. Clarke) meant – a device for building duplicates of something else. You’d think this would be a logical result of a teleportation device (certainly it is in Larry Niven’s essay “The Theory and Practice of Teleportation”), but I honestly don’t recall anyone considering that. In any event, the “replicator” part of “replicator pantograph” is an adjective. And a pretty unneccessary one – it’s redundant. The whole point of a pantograph is replication.
*I was surprised to find 19th century uses of the word “Disintegrator”. But the first use of the term to mean a futuristic weapon is in Garret Serviss’ Edison’s Conquest of Mars. Earlier uses of the term refer to a grinding mill(!)
A quick look through early 20th century uses of “replicator” shows most to be:
a.) the latin word “replicator”
b.) An official in a debate
c.) A biological method of making new cell cultures in a petri dish
AHA! Check the entry on “Matter Duplication” in the online SF Encyclopedia. I’d forgotten that they did this is George O. mith’s Venus Equilateral series, where it becomes an important plot point. But the idea is older than those 1940s stories of his:
The only real difference is that nobody calls them “replicators”
I backed out from the ngram viewer and searched for ‘“replicator” 1924’. (Double quotes force the exact word.) That, unlike the bottom-of-page search suggested above, gave me
Link to preview here.
It doesn’t look like that one belongs on a starship.
Go to the Wiki page for Replicator (Star Trek). There’s a footnote to “Confronting a New ‘Era of Duplication’? 3D Printing, Replicating Technology and the Search for Authenticity in George O. Smith’s Venus Equilateral Series”. Durham University. Retrieved July 21, 2013.
And go to the Venus Equilateral page. Under the summary for the story “Special Delivery”:
We can look back at it and see that a matter duplicator is the same concept, but I can’t find any evidence that people realized it until the 60s. I checked Bleiler’s theme index for SF:The Early Years and SF: The Gernsback Years and nothing turns up for replicator, duplicator, matter duplicator, or any other variation I checked. There are a couple of references to duplicating people, but that seems pretty far away. And much more obvious. It’s very, very unusual to find a concept nobody thought of before 1930.
The Waldo is patented as “Waldo F. Jones’ Synchronous Reduplicating Pantograph”. So not replicating.
Are you saying that George O. Smith didn’t understand that his Matter Duplicator wasn’t a device for making perfect copies of the original? That is, after all, the point that story is getting at. Not to mention the other examples in the bit I cited. Certainly they all realized this before the 1960s.
I’m afraid I don;t understand your comment at all.
Making copies of an original isn’t much of an innovation. Even making originals out of nothing is basic magic. Having a scientific way to dial up new things from basic elements is a much bigger leap. The notion that we could put together things from basics is much older, true. There are predictions in the 19th century that science would soon create food out of components and solve hunger. But that’s still not the Replicator.
I don’t have the Venus stories but it doesn’t sound from those descriptions that Smith had that concept in mind.