Where does the word ‘robot’ come from?

This is a question that Alex, the young protagonist of my novel Monstrous Devices, is asked early in the story. Regular visitors to Science Focus will undoubtedly know the answer.

But even though he is a smart kid, with a particular passion for collecting old clockwork and battery-operated toy robots, Alex finds himself suddenly stumped. The word is so ubiquitous he simply never stopped to consider that it must have started somewhere. In common with many people, I’d guess, he would be entirely unaware that this year actually marks the 100th anniversary of its entry into the language.

It was in 1920, in Prague, that history’s first ever “robots” appeared, scribbled in longhand in the pages of R.U.R., a play written that year by the brilliant Czech writer Karel Čapek. The initials are explained in the subtitle: Rossum’s Universal Robots, the name of the company at the centre of the drama, a business devoted to making artificial people. Designed to carry out all the work and drudgery the factory’s owners assume humans would prefer not to, thereby freeing humankind to devote itself to finer, higher things – “You will be free and supreme: you will have no other task, no other work, no other cares than to perfect your own being…” – their robots are soon mass produced and sold in the millions around the world.

For a while – leaving aside passing mention of a luddist uprising by unemployed workers who started destroying their inhuman replacements, quickly quashed when it was decided to begin arming the robots for defence – all is well.

But the utopia doesn’t last. In a development that perhaps would not surprise fans of Blade Runner, Westworld, Terminator and countless other sci-fi fables to have appeared in R.U.R.’s wake, the robots, created to have superior physical and intellectual capacities than humans, revolt, turn on their masters, and slaughter everyone on the planet.

“The product of the human brain has escaped the control of human hands,” Čapek summed it up. He was keen to point out it was a comedy.

First performed in Prague in January 1921, R.U.R. was such a success that an English-language adaptation was on Broadway the following year. By 1923, the play had been translated into thirty languages, and the strange new word was already becoming implanted into our culture.

“Let me be a robot for two hours a day,” George Bernard Shaw quipped in 1923, referring to his opinion that having a repetitive, mechanical task to do worked wonders in allowing his mind to wander creatively – although he was quick to add, “but for the rest of the day let me be Bernard Shaw.”

By that decade’s end, “robot” was routinely being used as the noun for, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition, “a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically.”

Science Focus