In 1920, thirty years old Karel Čapek, an emerging literary star of the newborn Czechoslovakia, was thinking about a new play for the National Theater in Prague. Its heroes would be "artificial workers" or "living and intelligent working machines". When he racked brains how to name them, first he came up with Labors. However, he was not entirely satisfied. He shared his doubts with his older brother. Josef Čapek was a respected painter, they had already written a few things together, so Karel often took his advice. "'Name them Robots,' the painter muttered with a brush in his mouth and continued to paint. "And that was it," Karel Čapek himself later described it.
Only a few weeks before that, in the village of Petrovichi near the Russian-Belarusian border, a baby was born in the Jewish family of Azimovs. The parents named their son Isaac. The exact date of his birth is unknown; it was sometime between October 1919 and early 1920. Nevertheless, the family, who arrived on RMS Baltic from the newborn Soviet Russia to New York at the end of February 1923, gave as the official birthday of the eldest of their three children January 2, 1920 and altered “z” for “s” in his name. Isaac Asimov later became so famous that he is known all over the world.
Like Isaac Asimov himself, Čapek’s robot was taken to New York at an early age. It arrived there even four months earlier than little Isaac and his family: the American premiere of R.U.R. was staged by The Theater Guild at the Garrick Theater on Broadway on October 9, 1922.
Twenty years later, the paths of Čapek’s robot and Isaac Asimov finally crossed. But back to the 1920s Czechoslovakia.
Karel Čapek began writing R.U.R at the beginning of 1920, supposing the world premiere would be at the National Theater in Prague by the end of the year. Therefore, it was published in November 1920 by Aventinum with a cover by Josef Čapek. The original plan was however drastically changed by an amateur theater ensemble from the East Bohemian city of Hradec Králové. The group did not respect the postponement of the first night at the National Theater, and performed R.U.R. first on stage on January 2, 1921. It was staged at the Czech National Theatre only on January 25, 1921, more than three weeks later. Quite curiously, the world premiere of one of the most famous Czech play of the 20th century thus took place at a small regional theater, performed by amateur actors and directed by a State Railways inspector.
Čapek’s "collective drama in introductory comedy and three acts", as the subtitle of R.U.R. reads, became an instant classic. The play lasted in National Theater’s repertoire for six years and the tickets were even sold on the black market. It made sense, as Čapek cleverly explored an important topic of his time – the potentially destructive influence of technological civilization on society (a motif recurring in many of his other works) – and at the same time created an impressive warning metaphor of a modern era controlled not so much by ideas and values as by self-confident and ruthlessly practical intellect and predatory tycoons.
There have been many interpretations of this metaphor, including the opinion that it was a harsh critique of selfish capitalism or the assumption that the author warns against the exact opposite, the threat of revolts and revolutions. For some, the main characters of the play were humans, for others it was robots.
With the hindsight of a hundred years, newer interpretations of Čapek’s metaphors and figures are at hand. Rossum’s Universal Robots Company could be seen in today's eyes as a global biotechnology corporation, comparable in assets value, innovation drive and influence on world affairs to Google, Apple and Tesla combined. The key human heroine of the drama, Helena Glory, is an archetype of a today’s activist of a global human rights NGO. Robots, products created by humans, are destroying their creators just as our current inventions and many products created by humans are able to destroy even the entire planet.
R.U.R. appealed to the audience wherever the play arrived. As early as 1921, the drama premiered in Aachen (Germany), a year later in Warsaw, Belgrade, and, as already mentioned, in New York. In 1923 it was staged in London, Vienna, Berlin, Zurich, and the following year in Paris and Tokyo, Budapest and Krakow.
The drama was appreciated by H. G. Wells, the famous author of War of the Worlds and one of the world's most influential public intellectuals of his time, who later promoted Čapek’s Nobel Prize nomination. In 1938, R.U.R. became the first television production of science fiction when it was presented by the BBC as one of its first dramatic acts.
Just as vigorously as the play invaded world stages, the Czech born robot began to occupy not only the world's cultural but also scientific and public space. Unlike a human being who can only become a global celebrity, robot has become a global phenomenon, one of the symbols of an increasingly powerful technological civilization.
However, Karel Čapek was not the only one who contributed to the robot’s rise to global prominence. Isaac Asimov is the one who has probably contributed the most to making the robot famous worldwide.
The son of a Brooklyn candy store owner began studying zoology at Columbia University, but eventually earned a degree in biochemistry, which he later taught for several years at Boston University School of Medicine. In the meantime, he was writing science fiction, with increasing success.
Asimov entered the history of the genre mainly through two thematic areas and book series associated with them: apart from the galactically sweeping saga of Foundation, it was a series of stories about robots. It consists of several dozen short stories, particularly the collection I, Robot from 1950 and the novels The Steel Cave (1954), The Naked Sun (1957), Robots of Dawn (1983) and Robots and Empire (1985).
By formulating these laws, however, Asimov took one absolutely fundamental step: the robot as an artificial being ceased to be a threat to man and became his partner, protector and servant.
This is one of the reasons why Asimov's laws are still quoted, but also modified and amended to correspond with the world not only fictitious but real, the world into which robots are gradually moving. Nowadays they are already part of production halls, armaments, operating theaters and kitchen units. So far, they are just machines. Robots as our real-life partners, such as Čapek’s Primus and Helena or Asimov's Robbie and Daneel Olivaw, are still fiction.
Written by Jaroslav Veis
Photo: Shutterstock
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