In 1920,
Karel Čapek solidified the robot concept in a play called
Rossum’s Universal Robots. It was the first time the word “robot”
had ever been used. The Slavic word for “hard labor” is
robota, and is likely where the word came from. The play counts as
science fiction, because these strange robots, although portrayed by human
actors, were not exactly human, seemed all too happy to work, and touched upon
very real concerns about ethics, as the debate raged in the play about whether
or not they were being exploited.
Čapek’s work would inspire many
others. In 1939, BBC television broadcast a five minute segment of his famous
play, making the first ever science fiction T.V. broadcast. Other sci-fi greats
would give subtle nods to the earlier work, such as the Star Trek episode Requium for
Methuselah, where a female android was named Rayna Chapek. In the cartoon
series, Futurama, the episode Fear of a Bot Planet features a planet
called Chapek, which is entirely inhabited by robots. And in Joss Whedon’s
television series, Dollhouse, the
corporation that makes “dolls” is named the Rossum
corporation, as a way of saying how the humans there had been, essentially
“roboticized.”
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