from 'the writer's almanac':
It’s the birthday of the writer Josef Čapek (books by this author), born in Hronov in what is now the Czech Republic in 1887. His brother, Karel, was the famous writer, but Josef will go down in history as the man who invented the word robot. Karel Čapek wrote a play called R.U.R., or Rossum’s Universal Robots (1921), a dystopian work about mass-produced human substitutes who are employed as cheap labor. But Karel Čapek couldn’t think of a good word for his artificial laborers — he was going to go with laboři but decided that was too obvious. Josef suggested roboti, and the name stuck. Josef was arrested and sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp from which he wrote Poems from a Concentration Camp (1946). He died there in 1945.