Events

• 1938 – BBC Television produces the world’s first ever science fiction television programme, an adaptation of a section of the Karel Čapek play R.U.R., that coined the term “robot”.

R.U.R.

R.U.R. is a 1920 science-fiction play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek. “R.U.R.” stands for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots, a phrase that has been used as a subtitle in English versions).

The play had its world premiere on 02 January 1921 in Hradec Králové; it introduced the word “robot” to the English language and to science fiction as a whole. R.U.R. soon became influential after its publication. By 1923 it had been translated into thirty languages. R.U.R. was successful in its time in Europe and North America.

Čapek later took a different approach to the same theme in his 1936 novel War with the Newts, in which non-humans become a servant-class in human society.