The word for the machine that works, from the Czech word for forced labor, born already plotting a revolt.
Documented
The Čapek brothers' coinage
Karel Čapek's play R.U.R., Rossum's Universal Robots, premiered in 1920 and gave the language the word, from robota, the forced labor of Central European serfs. Karel credited his brother Josef with suggesting it.
Assessment: Documented coinage, dated and attributed. The word's first meaning was the workers' condition, not the machine.
Stories
Metal men that were not metal
Picture a robot and you see tin and rivets. Čapek's originals were biological, assembled in vats, closer to what we would now call clones. The metal body was the movies' idea.
Assessment: Documented stage history. The word outgrew its inventor's design in a decade.
Interesting claims
The revolt was inside the word
The observation: a labor term became the machine term at the exact moment machines began replacing labor. The anxiety did not follow the word; the word carried it from birth, and every automation panic since is etymology repeating itself.
Assessment: A reading with a calendar to back it. Some words are predictions wearing a definition.
Sources and further reading
Čapek, R.U.R. (1920), premiere records
Karel Čapek's letter crediting Josef Čapek
Oxford English Dictionary, robot, from robota
Czech robota, forced labor, standard references
Worth asking
The word never stopped meaning forced labor. Every time you say it, who is doing the work?