to build gigantic stores that sold everything imaginable under one roof. The
movement had started in 1838 with the Bon Marché department store in Paris.
By the 1890s, department stores were an accelerating international epidemic,
with continued expansions, glamorizing, and advertising over succeeding
decades. The letter writer notes that even further expansion of department stores
could yet “do away with so many people employed to distribute where one-third
of them could do as well.”14
In Chicago, Marshall Field & Co., established in 1881, built a seven-story
department store in downtown Chicago in 1887. It then built an even more
glamorous nine-story store in 1893, to coincide with the large crowds expected
to attend the international fair, the 1893 Columbian Exposition. In 1897,
Chicago’s elevated street railway, called “The Loop,” was completed, connecting
many more people to Marshall Field’s, marking an innovation in efficient
retailing that may have prompted this letter writer.
Particularly striking during the 1893–99 depression was a spike in public
anger about trusts, combinations of companies that fixed prices at a high level.
In an 1899 talk in New York, John C. Chase, mayor of Haverhill, Massachusetts,
and former trade unionist, said, “The trust is, in my opinion, a labor saving
machine,” apparently meaning that the modern trust adopts such machines in its
inhuman effort to dispense with labor.15

Machines, Robots, and Future Technological Unemployment
The notion of a world without labor became more vivid with E. M. Forster, the
English novelist famous for such classics as A Room with a View, A Passage to
India, and Howards End. Forster’s 1909 science fiction story “The Machine
Stops” described a future in which machines do everything:
Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance
and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and
switches everywhere—buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There
was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble
rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There
was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature, and
there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends.
The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared
for in the world.16
Forster’s story ends when the machine unexpectedly malfunctions, bringing
death and destruction to a world that has grown too dependent on it.
A little more than a decade later, during the 1920–21 depression, the labor-
saving machine narrative mutated again, leading to the idea of robots. A 1921
Czech play, R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots, by Karel Čapek, coined the
word robot, from the Czech word for worker, to replace the earlier terms labor-
saving invention and automaton. The play first appeared in English translation in
New York in October 1922, to strong reviews. The play was not a big immediate
success, and it was not made into a movie until 1948. But it started a narrative
epidemic.
The play and its ideas went viral enough to cause the word robot to enter
most of the world’s languages. The play tells the story of the scientist Rossum,
who invents a robot, and the businessman Domin, who starts manufacturing
robots and who ultimately faces a revolt of the robots, who have developed
minds of their own. The idea of a mechanical man who walks, talks, and fights
might seem to be more inherently contagious than stories of push-button devices,
but Čapek’s initial story reached only a small base of people, and so the robot
epidemic was gradual. Perhaps the recovery rate was also low because of the
constant reminders of technological innovations in the following decades. Very

few newspapers mentioned robots in the 1920s, but use of the term grew over
the decades. To become more contagious, the idea of a robot may have needed
further development by creative people.