Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov, who did much to popularize robots, said that Čapek's play was "terribly bad." He thought the word "robot" was cool though. (Source)
Čapek was a dedicated anti-fascist; he was third on the list of people the Gestapo planned to arrest when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. Čapek died in 1938, three months before the invasion. (Source)
Čapek thought that R.U.R. was the "least interesting of all his works." (Source)
The word "robot" comes from a Slavonic root meaning "slave." Karel's brother Josef suggested the word as a name for the robots in the play. (Source)