1921: A play about robots premieres at the National Theater in Prague, Czechoslovakia.
R.U.R., by Karel 
apek, marks the first use of the word robot to describe an artificial person. apek invented the term, basing it on the Czech word meaning “forced labor.” The robots in apek’s play are not mechanical men made of metal. Instead, they are molded out of a chemical batter, and they look exactly like humans.
In the play, over the course of just fifteen years, the price of a robot has dropped from $10,000 to $150. (In today’s money, that’s $128,000 down to $1,900.) Each robot “can do the work of two and a half human laborers,” so humans could be free to have “no other task, no other work, no other cares” than perfecting themselves. However, the robots come to realize that even though they have “no passion, no history, no soul,” they are stronger and smarter than humans. They kill every human but one.
The play explores themes that would later become staples of robot science fiction, including freedom, love, and destruction. Although many of apek’s other works were more famous during his lifetime, R.U.R. is the one he is best known for today.
1979: In a remarkable coincidence, the first recorded human death caused by a robot occurred on the fifty-eighth anniversary of the play’s premiere.
A twenty-five-year-old Ford Motor assembly-line worker was killed on the job in a Flat Rock, Michigan, casting plant. Robert Williams died instantly when the robot’s arm slammed him as he was gathering parts in a storage facility, where the robot also retrieved parts. Williams’s family was later awarded $10 million in damages. The jury agreed that the robot struck Williams in the head because it lacked safety measures, such as an alarm that would go off when the robot approached a person.—TL, DK