From Automata to Automation: The Birth of the Robot in R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)

Abstract

Karel Čapek’s science fiction melodrama R.U.R. or Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920) dreamed up a new category of automaton workers called Robots. The word ‘Robot’ is derived from the Czech robota meaning ‘drudgery’ or ‘servitude’; a robotnik is Czech for both worker and serf or peasant. (Robot is always capitalized, since it is a trade-marked brand name.) R.U.R. enjoyed enough cultural capital that the play introduced the word Robot into the lexicon. The R.U.R. factory, an early-adopter of acronyms (R.U.R. stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots), is located on a remote island in the future where Robot workers are manufactured. (A poster from the Prague production listed the year as 2000, although the date is never specified in any version of the script.) An island setting is traditional for both science fiction and utopian literature: think of Thomas More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, or H. G. Wells’s Island of Dr Moreau. But like most utopian literature of the twentieth century, the world of R.U.R. is distinctly dystopian. Over the decade that passes during the course of the play, Robots replace human beings as workers in all areas of industry, including in the military. These replacement Robots allow humans the ultimate leisure time. However, certain Robots are surreptitiously given larger brains.