The short, strange life of the first friendly robot: Japan's Gakutensoku was a giant pneumatic automaton that toured through Asia—until it mysteriously disappeared

Rossum's Universal Robots-or R.U.R., as it had become known- had premiered two years earlier in Prague and had already become a worldwide sensation. The play, written by Karel Ğapek, describes the creation of enslaved synthetic humans, or robots-a term derived from robota, the Czech word for "forced labor." Ğapek's robots, originally made to serve their human masters, gained consciousness and rebelled, soon killing all humans on Earth. In the play's final scene, the robots reveal that they possess emotions just like we do, and the audience is left wondering whether they would also achieve the ability to reproduce-the only thing still separating robots from humans.