The Czech word for forced labor entered the world's vocabulary through a science fiction play.
The word robot was introduced in the 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Czech playwright Karel Čapek.1 The play depicted a factory that manufactured artificial workers from synthetic biological material, workers designed to perform labor without complaint. The robots eventually rebel and destroy their creators.
Čapek himself did not coin the word. He credited his brother Josef, a painter and writer, with suggesting it. Karel had originally wanted to call the artificial workers laboři, from the Latin labor, but found the word too artificial.2
The Czech word robota means forced labor, drudgery, or corvée, the kind of compulsory work serfs owed to their feudal lords.3 The root is the Old Church Slavonic rabota, meaning servitude. In Russian, rabota still means work. In Czech, the word carried centuries of association with unfreedom.
The play was a sensation. By 1923, R.U.R. had been translated into more than thirty languages.4 The New York Theatre Guild staged it in 1922, and the word robot displaced older terms like automaton and android in English and in dozens of other languages.
The robots in Čapek's play were not mechanical. They were biological, made from synthetic organic matter, closer to what later science fiction would call androids. The play's premise was a critique of mechanization and the dehumanization of labor in the wake of World War I.5
Čapek was named the second-most-wanted enemy of the Nazi regime in Czechoslovakia. He died of pneumonia on Christmas Day 1938, just before the Gestapo caught up with him. His brother Josef, who had suggested the word that entered every language on earth, died in a concentration camp.6