We’re obviously a little robot crazy here at Gent, but c’mon, who doesn’t love a robot or two?  If you didn’t get to read our little robot history lesson earlier check it out below.

We were talking about robots here at HQ and began to wonder where we got we even got the term “robot” – was it just via the usual Latin route or is there something more interesting to blame?  Well, it turns out to be the latter (thanks Wikipedia!):

The word robot was introduced to the public by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), published in 1920. The play begins in a factory that makes artificial people called robots, but they are closer to the modern ideas of androids, creatures who can be mistaken for humans. They can plainly think for themselves, though they seem happy to serve. At issue is whether the robots are being exploited and the consequences of their treatment.

However, Karel Čapek himself did not coin the word. He wrote a short letter in reference to an etymology in the Oxford English Dictionary in which he named his brother, the painter and writer Josef Čapek, as its actual originator. In an article in the Czech journal Lidové noviny in 1933, he explained that he had originally wanted to call the creatures laboři (from Latin labor, work). However, he did not like the word, and sought advice from his brother Josef, who suggested "roboti". The word robota means literally work, labor or serf labor, and figuratively "drudgery" or "hard work" in Czech and many Slavic languages. Traditionally the robota was the work period a serf had to give for his lord, typically 6 months of the year. Serfdom was outlawed in 1848 in Bohemia, so at the time Čapek wrote R.U.R., usage of the term robota had broadened to include various types of work, but the obsolete sense of "serfdom" would still have been known.  The word robotics, used to describe this field of study, was coined by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov.

DETAILS
-  Robot Bottle Stoppers
-  Available in Black, Red or Silver.
-  $7.95 Flat Rate Shipping - no matter how much you buy