Who were actually the greatest visionaries of the 20th century? Maybe two Czech brothers named Karel and Josef Čapek.
102 years ago today, on January 2, 1921, Karel Čapek’s play RUR had its world premiere in Hradec Králové, also known as Königgrätz, the scene of the most important battle of the Austro-German war. The third “R” stands for “Robot”. In the drama, these machine people soon change the whole of society in a dramatic way.
workers and traffic lights
Josef Čapek, Karel’s brother and also a writer, came up with the name, but was particularly successful as a painter and draftsman.
“Robota” means “hard slave labor” in Czech. Čapek’s robots are more like androids by today’s definition. However, the word quickly established itself worldwide as a collective term for all sorts of machines that function to some extent without direct human operation.
In South Africa, for example, traffic lights are still called “robots” today.
Wars with newts and pandemics from the Far East
Numerous other writings, such as the science fiction novel “The War with the Newts”, were quite far-sighted. In addition, Karel Čapek also started the trend that continues to this day that every decent writer (or today: every celebrity) also has to publish about their arbor, weeding and rhododendron preferences. “The Year of the Gardener” is the name of the highly recommended work illustrated by Josef.
Karel Čapek’s other clairvoyant works include a drama called The White Sickness. The 1937 play is about a deadly pathogen that originated in China and is spreading around the world. On the one hand. On the other hand, Čapek deals with the rule of a dictator in Europe, who first annexes a small country and ultimately triggers a world war.
In 1939 the Gestapo wanted to arrest him. But Karel had already died of pneumonia at the end of 1938.
Josef Čapek was murdered by the Nazis in 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The inventor of the word “robot” was even more versatile, for example as a painter between Cubism and Expressionism. His literary visions include the utopian play “Land with Many Names”, but also a children’s book about the eleven Czech Klapperzahn brothers, written by Eduard Bass, which he illustrated. With Honza, the eldest, in goal and coached by Father Klapperzahn, they form an unbeatable football team worldwide. Until the big final against the soccer world power Australia.
It is unlikely that this will come true, for a number of reasons.
The machines take over
But what about the vision at the end of Karel Čapek’s play RUR? Here the robots take over, killing all humans except for one engineer. This then helps to complete the new creation. He leaves Primus and Helena as the new Adam and Eve.
A development in this direction hold given the progress of Artificial Intelligence (AI) today many experts – and AIs – consider it not impossible. So maybe we should slowly turn the “robot” to red here?
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