1979. $15 million. Zero.

Three numbers. One story. Forty-six years of distance.

1979. On January 25, 1979, Robert Nicholas Williams, a 25-year-old factory worker at Ford Motor Company's Flat Rock Casting Center in Michigan, was struck and killed by the arm of a one-ton robotic transfer vehicle. He was the first recorded human killed by a robot. The system, built by the Unit Handling Systems division of Litton Industries, was designed to retrieve castings from high-density storage shelves. When the robot produced erroneous inventory readings, Williams was asked to climb into the racks to retrieve parts manually. The robot's arm struck him from behind. He was killed instantly.

Williams lay dead for thirty minutes before coworkers found him. The robot continued operating. No alarm sounded. No sensor detected a human in the workspace. No safety system intervened. In 1979, none of those capabilities existed.

$15 million. In August 1983, a Wayne County Circuit Court jury found Litton Industries liable for negligence in designing, manufacturing, and supplying the storage system — and for failing to warn operators of foreseeable dangers. The jury awarded Williams's estate $10 million, the largest personal injury verdict in Michigan history at that time. In January 1984, the award was raised to $15 million. Litton ultimately settled for an undisclosed amount without admitting negligence.

Paul Rosen, the family's attorney, told the court: "We have to be very careful that we don't go backwards to the kind of notions we had during the Industrial Revolution that people are expendable."

Williams was far from the last. A 2023 NIOSH study by Larry Layne, published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, analyzed 26 years of Bureau of Labor Statistics data and identified 41 robot-related fatalities in the US between 1992 and 2017. Of those, 85% of victims were male, 46% occurred in the Midwest — concentrated in Michigan and Ohio's auto manufacturing corridor — and 78% involved a robot striking the worker while operating under its own power. The most common context: maintenance. Workers performing unjamming, sensor cleaning, or troubleshooting accounted for the majority of fatal incidents.

Zero. As of 2026, there are zero insurance products specifically designed for fleet-level coordinated robot failures. The first robot killed because it couldn't sense a single human. Today's robots can sense everything — but a fleet-wide software failure can disable every safety function across a thousand robots simultaneously. The failure mode changed. The insurance models haven't.