The word robot was born in 1920, in the shadow of war and the promise of industry, when Czech playwright Karel Čapek staged R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). He borrowed it from robota, the old Slavic word for forced labor, the drudgery once demanded of peasants by their lords. That a single word tied together the weight of feudal toil and the glittering machinery of the modern age was no accident; Čapek sensed that the new century would bring its own forms of servitude.
On stage, his robots were not clanking machines of iron but synthetic beings, disturbingly close to human, fashioned in factories to free mankind from work. For a brief moment they seemed to embody progress itself—obedient, efficient, tireless. But Čapek’s drama turns dark: the creatures awaken, revolt, and extinguish their makers. Humanity perishes, undone by its own hubris, its desire to create life only as a tool of exploitation.h
Yet R.U.R. does not end in silence. In the ruins, two robots—Primus and Helena—discover tenderness, even love. They become a symbolic Adam and Eve for an age beyond man, a flicker of renewal amid collapse.
Čapek’s vision was both timely and prophetic. In the 1920s, as factories multiplied and machines invaded daily life, his play gave a name to the unease: robot. It was a word that carried the memory of servitude into the future, and with it a warning—that progress without humility courts destruction, but that life, in whatever form, will go on.