Robert Williams was an American engineer, considered the first known human to have been killed by a robot.
Working at a Ford Motor Company factory in Flat Rock, Michigan, Williams was killed by an industrial robot arm on January 25, 1979. He died instantly when the 1-ton production-line robot arm hit him on the head when he was moving materials from one part of the factory to another.
At that time, Williams was 25.
William's wife and three children sued Ford and the manufacturer of the robot, Litton Industries, for a total of $15 million. The family was granted $10 million, with the court concluding that there simply were not enough safety measures in place to prevent such accident from happening.
The incident that a robot kills a human, is later known as "roboticide".
Then in 1981, a maintenance engineer at a Kawasaki Heavy Industries plant named Kenji Urada was accidentally killed by an automotive robot.
Because at the time of Urada's death, William's death was still in litigation, news agencies mistakenly declared that Urada was the first man killed by a robot. This was mostly because the two accidents were similar, and also because the agencies lack the knowledge about Williams' death.
But when litigation ended in 1983, news agencies were better informed of the facts of the case: Robert Williams was the first human killed by a robot, and Urada was second.
