fear of robots was not strong in most of the 1920s, when the word robot was coined. The big wave of fear had to wait until the 1930s. Historian Amy Sue Bix (2000) offers a theory to explain why the 1920s were fearless: the kinds of innovations that received popular acclaim in the 1920s didn’t obviously replace jobs. If asked to describe new technology, people in most of the 1920s would perhaps think first of the Model T Ford, whose sales had burgeoned to 1.5 million cars a year by the early part of the decade. Radio stations, which first appeared around 1920, provided an exciting new form of
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