Today in HistoryâJanuary 25: Rule Number 1: Donât 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 lifeâuntil the manner of his death made history.
Williamsâs 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 Companyâs 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 machineâwhich continued working as if nothing had happenedâhad 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, Williamsâs 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.
More than 100 workers at a Ford plant in Spain now wear Iron Manâlike exoskeleton suits to do their jobs on the assembly line.
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, Williamsâs 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.
- 40+: Human deaths from robots since 1990
- 4 million: Robots working in factories around the world in 2024
- 57,000: Fordâs hourly workers in the U.S. in 2024
- 41: Claudius unexpectedly becomes emperor of Rome
- 1945: Grand Rapids, Michigan, is the first city to add fluoride to drinking water
- 1961: Disneyâs One Hundred and One Dalmatians is released in the U.S.
