Today in History—January 25: Rule Number 1: Don’t Harm Humans

On this day in 1979, Robert Nicholas Williams died at work.

Born in 1953, Williams lived in Dearborn Heights, Michigan. He was survived by his wife and three children, his mother, and five sisters. The 25-year-old was a normal young man with a normal life—until the manner of his death made history.

Williams’s death is the first recorded instance of a person being killed by a robot.

Long before robots patrolled factory floors, science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov imagined a future governed by a few simple rules. The first and arguably most important: Machines should never harm humans. That rule was broken this day.

Williams worked at Ford Motor Company’s Flat Rock, Michigan, plant as an electronic parts-retrieval system operator. The factory used industrial robots to pull parts from high-density, multistory storage systems. When one of these systems appeared to malfunction, Williams climbed into a third-story shelving unit to investigate.

Inside, he was struck in the head by the mechanical arm of a one-ton production-line robot and killed. The machine—which continued working as if nothing had happened—had no ability to distinguish between Williams and the parts it needed to move. It took 30 minutes before human workers discovered what had happened.

In the lawsuit that followed, Williams’s family was awarded $10 million, the largest personal injury verdict in Michigan history at the time. The jury concluded that basic safety measures were absent, including alarms or automatic shutdowns.

This was not an act of intent (especially with 1979 technology). It was a tragic accident, occurring at a moment when technology was advancing faster than safeguards designed to protect the people working with it.

More than four decades later, Williams’s name remains attached to a grim historical first, a reminder of the human cost of technology and the responsibility required when humans and machines share the same spaces.