In this book, Victor Frankenstein, an anatomist, collects fragments of freshly dead bodies and, by the use of new scientific discoveries (not specified in the book), brings the whole to life, creating something that is referred to only as the "Monster" in the book. (In the movie, the life principle was electricity.)
However, the switch from the supernatural to science did not eliminate the fear of the danger inherent in knowledge. In the medieval legend of Rabbi Loew's golem, that monster went out of control and the rabbi had to withdraw the divine name and destroy him. In the modern tale of Frankenstein, the hero was not so lucky. He abandoned the Monster in fear, and the Monster, with an anger that the book all but justifies, in revenge killed those Frankenstein loved and, eventually, Frankenstein himself.
This proved a central theme in the science fiction stories that have appeared since Frankenstein. The creation of robots was looked upon as the prime example of the overweening arrogance of humanity, of its attempt to take on, through misdirected science, the mantle of the divine. The creation of human life, with a soul, was the sole prerogative of God. For a human being to attempt such a creation was to produce a soulless travesty that inevitably became as dangerous as the golem and as the Monster. The fashioning of a robot was, therefore, its own eventual punishment, and the lesson, "there are some things that humanity is not meant to know," was preached over and over again.
No one used the word "robot," however, until 1920 (the year, coincidentally, in which I was born). In that year, a Czech playwright, Karel Capek, wrote the play R.U.R., about an Englishman, Rossum, who manufactured artificial human beings in quantity. These were intended to do the arduous labor of the world so that real human beings could live lives of leisure and comfort.
Capek called these artificial human beings "robots," which is a Czech word for "forced workers," or "slaves." In fact, the title of the play stands for "Rossum's Universal Robots," the name of the hero's firm.
In this play, however, what I call "the Frankenstein complex" was made several notches more intense. Where Mary Shelley's Monster destroyed only Frankenstein and his family, Capek's robots were presented as gaining emotion and then, resenting their slavery, wiping out the human species.
The play was produced in 1921 and was sufficiently popular (though when I read it, my purely personal opinion was that it was dreadful) to force the word "robot" into universal use. The name for an artificial human being is now "robot" in every language, as far as I know.
Through the 1920s and 1930s, R U.R. helped reinforce the Frankenstein complex, and (with some notable exceptions such as Lester del Rey's "Helen O'Loy" and Eando Binder's "Adam Link" series) the hordes of clanking, murderous robots continued to be reproduced in story after story.
I was an ardent science fiction reader in the 1930s and I became tired of the ever-repeated robot plot. I didn't see robots that way. I saw them as machines-advanced machines -but machines. They might be dangerous but surely safety factors would be built in. The safety factors might be faulty or inadequate or might fail under unexpected types of stresses, but such failures could always yield experience that could be used to improve the models.
After all, all devices have their dangers. The discovery of speech introduced communication-and lies. The discovery of fire introduced cooking-and arson. The discovery of the compass improved navigation-and destroyed civilizations in Mexico and Peru. The automobile is marvelously useful-and kills Americans by the tens of thousands each year. Medical advances have saved lives by the million amp;-and intensified the population explosion.
In every case, the dangers and misuses could be used to demonstrate that "there are some things humanity was not meant to know," but surely we cannot be expected to divest ourselves of all knowledge and return to the status of the australopithecines. Even from the theological standpoint, one might argue that God would never have given human beings brains to reason with if He hadn't intended those brains to be used to devise new things, to make wise use of them, to install safety factors to prevent unwise use-and to do the best we can within the limitations of our imperfections.
So, in 1939, at the age of nineteen, I determined to write a robot story about a robot that was wisely used, that was not dangerous, and that did the job it was supposed to do. Since I needed a power source I introduced the "positronic brain." This was just gobbledygook but it represented some unknown power source that was useful, versatile, speedy, and compact-like the as-yet uninvented computer.
The story was eventually named "Robbie," and it did not appear immediately, but I proceeded to write other stories along the same line-in consultation with my editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., who was much taken with this idea of mine-and eventually, they were all printed.
Campbell urged me to make my ideas as to the robot safeguards explicit rather than implicit, and I did this in my fourth robot story, "Runaround," which appeared in the March 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. In that issue, on page 100, in the first column, about one-third of the way down (I just happen to remember) one of my characters says to another, "Now, look, let's start with the Three Fundamental Rules of Robotics."
This, as it turned out, was the very first known use of the word "robotics" in print, a word that is the now-accepted and widely used term for the science and technology of the construction, maintenance, and use of robots. The Oxford English Dictionary, in the 3rd Supplementary Volume, gives me credit for the invention of the word.