Karel Čapek

Born in Bohemia in 1890, Čapek trained as a philosopher before becoming Czechoslovakia's most prominent journalist and public intellectual, a close friend and eventual biographer of the new republic's first president, Tomáš Masaryk.

His 1920 play R.U.R. introduced the word 'robot' to the world (coined by his brother and collaborator Josef from the Czech robota, forced labor) years before he turned the same satirical instinct outward in War with the Newts, in which intelligent salamanders, discovered and enslaved as cheap labor, are industrialized, armed, and eventually turn on the humanity that exploited them.

An outspoken opponent of fascism named on a Gestapo arrest list after the Munich Agreement handed Czechoslovakia to Hitler, Čapek died of pneumonia in December 1938, days before German troops occupied Prague; his brother Josef, who had given the world the word robot, was later murdered in a concentration camp.