It all started with a screw. Celebrating the anniversary of Industrial Revolution, Tin Man's "parents" (the Illuminati), decided to invent a tiny Phillips head-compatible piece of hardware that, when properly oiled with love and care, would grow up to be a hideous monstrosity of tin, capable of terrorizing Oz villagers and lesser implements alike.

Although Tin Man's life progressed through the normal stages of budding hideous metallic creature development including the "terrible toaster twos", adolescence as an unruly, unmannered payphone, and an early adulthood of experimentation with psychedelic rivets, something turned him away from his creators' dictates.

A chance encounter with Dorothy Gale convinced Tin Man that the voices in his head directing him to kill, kill, kill, were in fact impeding his free-will and hence, development as an individual, and rather than ripping her heart out with his exacto-knife retractable fingernails, he followed a hidden subroutine in his neuro-matrix triggered by the chance magnetic fluctuations in the atmosphere as a result of the 2:25 tornado, and hugged her instead. Dorothy, seizing the moment, replaced his Illuminatico CPU with an Apple G3 600 Mhz processor, and then sealed his motherboard forever shut with saliva dripping from her favorite lollipop.

As a result of his quandary over whether to rip Dorothy's blood-pump from her chest, the last instinct of the Evil Tin Man was to "get a heart", and that is the only known order that stayed with him as the Good Tin Man after his upgrade and until his tragic disappearance.