The robot in Fritz Lang’s 1927 film “Metropolis” - the Maschinenmensch, or “machine-human,” disguised to look like the worker Maria - is widely regarded as the first major robot in cinema and the first “blockbuster” robot. It was designed by the German sculptor Walter Schulze-Mittendorff, whose face for the robot drew on the gold burial mask of Tutankhamun, discovered just five years earlier.
According to the Science Museum Group, which holds a 2016 replica reconstructed from Schulze-Mittendorff’s original drawings, the design went on to inspire generations of later film robots, including C-3PO in Star Wars. Its sleek metallic humanoid form established the default visual idea of “a robot” decades before any working humanoid machine existed - which is why the picture most people still carry of a robot owes more to a 1927 silent film than to any real device.