The year 2021 marks a 100 years since the Czech playwrite Karel Čapek introduced the world to the word “Robot”, when his play ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots (RUR)‘, premiered in Prague in January 1921.
Initially the writers brother gave him the idea to call these creatures in his play ‘roboti’ after the Czech word for serf or forced labourer, but Karel settled on ‘robot’.
At the time the play was a great success and fathered debates of whether technology might free and liberate workers from their manual labour. The play ‘RUR’ even played to audiences abroad and in 1927 was the first full-length play to be aired by the BBC in full length. Additionally in 1938 Rossum’s Universal Robots (RUR) became possibly the worlds first televised science fiction.
We knew nothing of the naming significance at the time, but it is certainly strange to think that in 2005 our very own Robert Pes, T-Plan CTO, created ‘VNCRobot’ in the Czech Republic, and when T-Plan purchased the tool in 2009 we kept the Czech Republic history, naming our award winning Test Automation product ‘T-Plan Robot‘.
