Josef Čapek

The word robot was coined by a painter. When Josef Čapek's younger brother Karel, the writer, was casting about for a name for the artificial workers in his 1920 play R.U.R., Josef suggested robot, from the Czech robota, meaning forced labour or drudgery. The word went around the world. The painting career it interrupted is far less remembered.

Čapek was a serious modern artist in Prague, absorbing Cubism and then working in a bold, simplified, folk-inflected style, with flattened figures and strong colour. He illustrated books, designed for the stage, wrote essays and children's stories, and edited a magazine, often alongside Karel.

His outspoken opposition to Hitler put him in danger early. Arrested soon after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, he was moved through a chain of camps, Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and finally Bergen-Belsen, where he died of typhus in April 1945, only weeks before the camp was liberated. The poems he wrote in captivity were smuggled out and published after the war.