We take robots for granted. Watching any Science Fiction show or movie, robots appear and we assume all kinds of things. Science Fiction is a cumulative genre. Like a giant pile of ideas, readers and viewers quickly adapt to new concepts and take them as a given afterwards. This highly absorbing trait often means the person who thought of the idea gets left behind as we race on past.
Sometimes we remember. Arthur C. Clarke came up with the idea for the satellite communications we all take for granted today. Another author who still gets credit is Isaac Asimov. He came up with “The Three Law of Robotics” in 1942 in a story called “Runaround” (Astounding Science Fiction, March 1942). He developed the laws with the help of editor, John W. Campbell. Asimov coined the word “Robotics” and later “Roboticist” in 1946’s “Evidence” (Astounding Science Fiction, September 1946). In 1944, Ike would create the idea of robots working in a squad.
But Asimov wasn’t the first to do this. The word “Android” dates back to the French in 1727 (Cyclopaedia, by Ephraim Chambers), meaning “having human features”. The concept of replacing bothersome women with robots that Ira Levin used in The Stepford Wives (1972) dates back to 1895 and Alice W. Fuller. So let’s look back and give credit where credit is due.
Robot servants from nannies to bartenders are not hard to find as we tried to think of how we would use robots if we had them. Some like George Jetson’s maid, Rosie, seem like obvious replacements. The first author to use the idea was Elizabeth Bellamy who had a robot cook and other servants in 1899’s “Ely’s Automatic Housemaid” in The Black Cat. David H. Keller would build on this is “The Psychophonic Nurse” (Amazing Stories, November 1928), in which he created robot servants to watch children, causing the dissolution of the family. Nat Schachner and Arthur Leo Zagat briefly mentions a robot waiter in Astounding in 1931.
Bellamy wrote before the use of the word “robot” which arrived in 1920 from Karl Capek’s play “R. U. R.” in which androids take over the world of men. The word robot means “serf labor” in Czech. The very word implies servitude and slavery.
It was Edmond Hamilton and Frank R. Paul who gave us the look of the robot, the metal bodied killer in “The Comet Doom” (Amazing Stories, January 1928). Hamilton’s robots are actually cyborgs with living brains. This story would spawn another SF cliche, the brain in a jar or outside the body.“His brain is gone!”
“The Doom From Planet Four” (Astounding Stories of Super-Science, July 1931) by Jack Williamson offers a metal monster of another form, not human-shaped but animal-like with many limbs. Martians communicate with humans who foolishly build a robot that then takes over and builds others that build a transmat pad. (Williamson would later give us the word “terra-forming”.)
“The Robot Aliens” by Eando Binder (Wonder Stories, February 1935) may not have invented the idea of robots coming from out there but it was the first story to use the word “alien” to mean extraterrestrial. Before this the word either referred to people from other countries or psychiatrists.
Raymond Z. Gallun would suggest for the first time very small robots in “A Menace in Miniature” (Astounding Stories, October 1937). The word nanobot would be decades later. The idea of shrinking thinks down was old before Gallun used it. Fitz-James O’Brien’s “The Diamond Lens” dates back to 1858. The novelty was that Gallun imagined robots at that size.
The first story to really look at robots with emotions was Lester Del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” (Astounding Science Fiction, December 1938). It might also be the first story to suggest a human-robot relationship. This would devolve into something uglier with Philip K. Dick’s “skin jobs” in Bladerunner (1982) and the actual sex robots of today.
Eando Binder wasn’t resting on his robot laurels. He came up with the first robot as protagonist for “I, Robot” (Amazing Stories, January 1939) that turned into a series of stories about Adam Link. The Binder boys also spawned the idea of a robot Mystery and robots on trial. One of the later stories “Adam Link’s Revenge” (Amazing Stories, February 1940) introduced the idea of robot suicide. (Think of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s terminator sacrificing himself in a vat of molten metal to get this one.)
The concept of “Living Machines” came from Francis Flagg and his “The Mentanicals” (Amazing Stories, April 1934). The distinction here is between automated mindless robots and one capable of learning and changing. Of course, when that happens, watch out humans!
Robert A. Heinlein gave us “waldoes” or robotic hands in “Waldo” (Astounding Science Fiction, August 1942). When the real deal was invented there could be no other name for them than Waldo.
The word “Droid” may have you thinking George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) but Mari Wolf used it in 1952 in “Robots of the World! Arise!” (IF, July 1952). Lucas has trademarked the word.
Robots will have many menial jobs. That is their greatest attraction for us humans. No longer having to do the grunt work. There is a terrible danger in that as Jack Williamson warned us in his masterpiece, “With Folded Hands” (Astounding Science Fiction, July 1947) but it was Fritz Leiber who thought of the robot salesman in “A Bad Day For Sales” (Galaxy, July 1953). Harry Harrison would take up this torch in a series that would be called The War of the Robots (1958) with blue collar robots in “The Velvet Glove” (Fantastic Universe, November 1956) and the robot cop in “Arm of the Law” (Fantastic Universe, August 1958). Wal-Mart announced their first cashier-less store this week. Laugh not.
Robots in earlier stories had gained emotions but this was mostly by accident, something the inventor hadn’t intended. In “Compassion Circuit” (Fantastic Universe, December 1954) by John Wyndham the emotions are planned into the machine. This idea would eventually become Mr. Data’s Emotion Chip in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Philip K. Dick created many ideas in his fiction as he explored the question of “What makes us human?” He created the Autofac or Automatic factory in “Autofac” (Galaxy, November 1955). He devised robots specifically for killing humans in “Second Variety” (Space Science Fiction, May 1953). The guard robot came from “Immunity” (Imagination, 1955). He even started towards the idea of nanobots in Counter Clock World (1967). His replicants from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1967) will always be best remembered.
The idea of small robots was popular in 1967 with sub-microscopic medical robots appearing in Philip E. High’s These Savage Futurians (1967). John Varley would give us the word “nanobot” in Steel Beach (1992).
We assume the word “Bot” is as old as “alien” or “astronaut” but this isn’t the case. It came from 1969 in Richard Meredith’s “We All Died at Breakway Station” (Amazing Stories, January–March 1969). Today the word has become particularly significant in terms of the Internet and automatic programs that influence elections. (Who wouldah thunk it?)
The idea of a robot in a position of religious importance, not being actual god, gave us the robot Pope in Robert Silverberg’s “Good News From the Vatican” (Universe 1, 1971). Clifford D. Simak would also use it for Project Pope (1981). The idea of a robot god is much older, such as “Answer” by Fredric Brown (Angels and Spaceships, 1954), “The Last Question” (Science Fiction Quarterly, November 1956) by Isaac Asimov or Frank Herbert’s Destination: Void (1966) and its “Worship!” Douglas Adams parodied the idea in A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978).
As prosthectic limbs became a reality it took Martin Caidin’s Steve Austin to give us the word “Bionics” in 1972 with his novel Cyborg. The television show, The Six-Million Dollar Man (1973-1978) with Lee Majors, and its spin-off, The Bionic Woman (1976-1978) with Lindsay Wagner, popularized the sound of Bionics.
Well, it seems appropriate we should end up back at Arthur C. Clarke and his novel A Rendezvous with Rama (1972) and the word “biot” for a biological robot. The alien environment of Rama is filled with such devices.
What new words will Science Fiction give us in the future? The world we live in today seems to have caught up to many ideas, including AI or artificial intelligence. That concept goes back to at least “The Metal Giants” (Weird Tales, December 1926) by Edmond Hamilton, the same story that gave us giant robots! What story will offer the next exciting (or frightening) idea that will become reality? Whatever it is, you can be sure Science Fiction will be there.
NB. Just a shout out to my main source for this piece: Technovelgy.com.
“The first story to really look at robots with emotions was Lester Del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” Not so. You even mention Capek’s RUR, but I guess you haven’t read it. The robots are driven entirely by their human emotions, and want to be considered human because they feel human emotions – a pair in the story are in love and want to marry.
I could point at John Wyndham’s “The Lost Machine” (1931) as well.Del Rey’s story seems to be the one everybody remembers.