#OTD in 1863.
Samuel Butler's dystopian article "Darwin among the Machines" is published (as by "Cellarius") in The Press newspaper in Christchurch, New Zealand; it will be incorporated into his novel Erewhon (1872).
This article suggested that machines might be kind of "mechanistic life," undergoing, the spirit of Darwinian natural selection, a kind of constant evolution, and that machines might eventually supplant humans as the dominant species.