Growing up with humans They have now officially walked among us for a century, turning on our imagination and finding a place in the cultural narrative. A few landmark robo-cool moments since Karel Capek gave us the word ‘robot’ in 1921
1921: R.U.R.
Consider this as backdrop: With the end of the First World War, a large part of a generation was killed with mechanical efficiency while the United States of America evolved from being a sleeping giant into a superpower. The world of science, too, was going through a tumultuous period Albert Einstein had come up with his theory of relativity a few years earlier. Czech intellectual Karel Capek introduced the word ‘robot’ in his play R.U.R. or Rossum’s Universal Robots, a satire on a spate of topics, including mechanisation and consumerism.