Today's leading-edge technology is headed straight for tomorrow's junk pile, but that doesn't make it any less awesome. Everyone loves the latest and greatest.
Sometimes, though, something truly revolutionary cuts through the clutter and fundamentally changes the game. And with that in mind, Wired is looking back over 12 decades to highlight the 12 most innovative people, places and things of their day. From the first transatlantic radio transmissions to cellphones, from vacuum tubes to microprocessors, we'll run down the most important advancements in technology, science, sports and more.
This week's installment takes us back to 1921-1930, when amphibious warfare came to fruition, Art Deco was all the rage and Babe Ruth became an icon.
We don't expect you to agree with all of our picks, or even some of them. That's fine. Tell us what you think we've missed and we'll publish your list later.
1920: Rise of the Robots (Entertainment)
A Czech play titled R.U.R. introduced the word "robot" in 1920, and science fiction would never be the same. The robots in Karel Čapek's play were not the type of clanking, whirring mechanical men typically found in the early sci-fi movies that would come later. Instead, the robots of R.U.R. were biological beings whipped up in a laboratory, created to aid humans by doing scut work. (The Czech term robota means "forced labor.")
R.U.R.'s robots had more in common with Blade Runner's replicants, Battlestar Galactica's skinjob Cylons or Cloud Atlas' fabricants than nuts-and-bolts characters like Forbidden Planet's Robby the Robot or Futurama's boozing, belching Bender.
While the great sci-fi writer Issac Asimov was no fan of R.U.R., he acknowledged its lasting contribution to life on Earth. "Capek's play is, in my own opinion, a terribly bad one, but it is immortal for that one word," he wrote in a 1979 essay. "It contributed the word 'robot' not only to English but, through English, to all the languages in which science fiction is now written."
Today, we take robots for granted, both in our science fiction and in our everyday lives, where they aid our assembly lines and help ease domestic drudgery. In books and on TV and movie screens, they can prove endlessly helpful (Star Trek: The Next Generation' Data), totally nightmarish (the Terminator franchise) or somewhere in between (Prometheus' David).
How about the proto-bots in R.U.R.? Spoiler alert: They kill every human on Earth, except for one.
Photo: Wikipedia