Tik-Tok is a fictional character from the Oz books by American author L. Frank Baum. He has been termed "the prototype robot," and is widely considered to be one of the first robots (preceded by Edward S. Ellis' Huge Hunter, or The Steam Man of the Prairies, in 1868) to appear in modern literature, though the term "Robot" was not used until the 1920s, in the play R.U.R.