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In the English version of R. U. R. (1923), when the Robots arm themselves against the factory’s managers, the general manager Domin says, “We can’t stop them.” Copy claim link
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Supporting evidence: primary · 1 source
Date 1923 · event Records dated 1923 → Wording attested 2019. English wording read in the Project Gutenberg transcription (2019) of an undated later Samuel French printing. Role Articulation Register (kind of text) Fiction Scope and limits Fiction. The control half of B6, staged as an event: the play’s people cannot stop the Robots they made. Earlier in the play a manager says the Robots have no will of their own. Butler’s letter of 1863 remains B6’s earliest located text. The Robots are manufactured from a synthetic living substance and are counted as machines throughout (decided on 2026-11-03). The evidence is a single line of dialogue whose immediate object is the Robots unloading arms; it is a narrow staged instance, not a general statement about control of machines. The Czech printing of 1920 (Aventinum) carries the counterpart passage (p. 61), as a second check by a model of another family read it on page images; the English wording is not dated from it.
The evidence 01 primary source Supports the claim
R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama in Three Acts and an Epilogue ↗ Samuel French, Inc.; copyright 1923 by Doubleday, Page and Company; Project Gutenberg eBook #59112 (2019), transcribed from HathiTrust page images · 1923
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Source excerpt “We can’t stop them.” Location in source Act Three, after the Robots unload firearms from the Amelia
How it was read Retrieved directly from the publisher
Machine-checked · 2026-11-04
Source details and check notes Authors Karel Čapek; Paul Selver (English version); Nigel Playfair (English version) Version Retrieved for the candidate pack on 2026-11-02 (SHA-256 c0191908dbcdc73a853cec0da4ebee618f8f45896b89c6ee3d8bebca29b10b98) and again at admission on 2026-11-04 (same file). The English acting version by Paul Selver and Nigel Playfair, Samuel French printing with a 1923 Doubleday copyright notice, read in the Project Gutenberg transcription. The transcription’s front matter includes a reviewer’s synopsis that is not Čapek’s text and is not quoted. The Czech original (Aventinum, 1920) was not read. Canonical address Open the canonical source ↗ Accessed 2026-11-04 Language English (en) Attribution Karel Čapek, Paul Selver (English version), Nigel Playfair (English version), “R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama in Three Acts and an Epilogue”, 1923. Reuse No open redistribution licence asserted. Bibliographic metadata, editorial paraphrases and short attributed quotations (at most 50 words each). Recheck terms before wider redistribution. Check notes Candidate pack passage, antecedent texts (research/prehistory). The quotation (4 words) matched a fresh retrieval of 2026-11-04 (SHA-256 c0191908dbcd…, the file the candidate pack read). Matching ignored differences of whitespace, case, quotation marks, dashes, line-break hyphens and Unicode compatibility forms, so the source’s typography can differ. No human editorial review. Status and meaning Editorial status. Machine-checked . Machines found this record and checked it against its sources; no person accepted it individually. Each evidence record above shows how it was checked.
Relation. A passage of the document meets the proposition’s criterion. The record documents what the text states, in its register (fiction and satire are labelled); it is not evidence that the proposition is true and implies no influence on or from another text.
Date. Copyright year of the English version as printed; not the date of the printing read.
Record ID pre-b6-capek-rur-1923