Indeed, the words "robot" and "android" both originally referred to beings of synthetic flesh rather than metal and circuits. The titular robota in Karel Capek's R.U.R. were pseudo-organic, and indeed that play has a lot of similarities with Blade Runner, in that it's about the created slave beings rebelling against their creators. It was the Captain Future series of pulp stories from the 1940s, created by Mort Weisinger and largely written by Edmond Hamilton, that first codified the idea that "robot" meant a mechanical-looking automaton and "android" meant a synthetic being made of simulated flesh and bone and humanlike in appearance. Though later works used "android" to mean a fully mechanical being that merely had the surface appearance of a living person, like Mudd's androids or Data. And some works used "robot" to mean that as well, for instance the humanlike robots and fembots in the '70s bionic series.
