Death by Robot
Robert Williams was the first man ever killed by a robot. On January 25, 1979, Williams climbed into a storage rack at the Ford Motor’s Flat Rock casting plant to retrieve a part because the parts-retrieval robot malfunctioned. Suddenly, the robot reactivated and slammed its arm into Williams’ head, killing him instantly.
The second death by robot happened just a couple of years afterwards in 1981. Kenji Urada, a 37-year-old Japanese maintenance engineer was working on a broken robot at a Kawasaki plant when he failed to turn it off. The robot’s mechanical arm accidentally pushed him into a grinding machine.
http://www.neatorama.com/2007/03/12/...hs-in-history/