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Several different conflicting accounts of the Creation of the Daleks exist, with the most plausible centering around the Kaled scientist, Davros.
Main account
Conceptual origins of the Daleks
On the planet Skaro, during the final days of the Thousand Year War between the Thals and Kaleds, both sides began to suffer mutations caused by the use of nuclear, biological and chemical agents. Some of the mutant survivors, the mutoes, managed to survive in the wastelands (DW: Genesis of the Daleks). Shan, a young Kaled scientist, authored a paper that theorized that with both Kaleds and Thals competing for resources, she called the only way out of this dilemma "the Dalek Solution". Davros took the paper and presented it to the Thal Council as his own (BFA: Davros). Another account says that Davros had found a prophecy in the forbidden Book of Predictions which stated that one day mortals would transcend into gods. The last word, said aloud, sounded like dal ek. (BFD: Guilt)
The first Daleks
Subsequently, Davros now crippled, was one of the Kaled Scientific Elite. He had begun experiments on living subjects, He hoped to deify the Kaled race. Davros pushed through legislation enabling authority (and ownership) of all Kaled infants under the age of five years old and delivered to Pediatric Facility K-99, which he used as a laboratory to do surgical experiments. Davros had Baran, a muto of Thal descent and transplanted his living brain into a Mark I Travel Machine. (BFD: Guilt)
Davros reveals the Daleks
Davros did not immediately show the results of his Dalek experiments to the Kaled Scientific Elite. He had improved and developed the shell for the organic components of the Daleks, housing them in tank-like and armed Mark III Travel Machines similar to those like his own life support chair. He maintained a nursery of embryonic Dalek young. As well as nurturing the physical form of his creations, Davros shaped their minds. The Daleks did not understand concepts such as pity. It did not exist in their "vocabulary banks".
The Doctor was sent on a mission by the Time Lords to prevent the creation of the Daleks in the first place, or at the very least lessen the damage they would do in future. Many other members of Kaled Scientific attempted to shut down the Dalek project. To prevent this, Davros arranged for the Thals to aim a missile at the Kaled Dome where his people resided. (DW: Genesis of the Daleks)
- Though he did not say so, the Time Lord representative who had approached the Doctor with this mission may very well have worked for the Celestial Intervention Agency. (NA: Lungbarrow)
The Daleks revolt against their creator
The Daleks were then sent to exterminate the Thals, supposedly in retaliation for the attack on the Kaled Dome. They later turned on Davros and apparently killed him. Accidently, a Dalek triggered an explosion which buried the Daleks in a bunker. In the aftermath, the Doctor believed that he had only retarded their progress by about a thousand years or so, and that they would return (DW: Genesis of the Daleks). Davros survived his "death" in a state of suspended animation. (DW: Destiny of the Daleks)
- The Daleks would later consider the Time Lords' act of trying to prevent their creation as the start of the Last Great Time War. For more details on this and on the objectives of the Doctor's mission, see separate article.
Other accounts
Historical account
Subsequent to their creation, the Daleks confined to their city believed that the war was a quick neutronic war and also believed that both sides of the war were horribly mutated from their original near-Human forms. However, the latter part was not the case, as the Thals were almost exactly like how they were before the war. (DW: The Daleks)
- Whether this account was real history mixed with legend or a more accurate account of a subsequent war is unclear, although the former seems more likely.
Possibly apocryphal account
Another account states tells of short blue humanoid Daleks whose warlord, Zolfian plotted to use neutron bombs against the Thals. Zolfian employed Yarvelling, a scientist to develop war machines against the survivors and ordered the factories to mass-produce more of them. Two weeks later, a meteorite strike destroyed both the factories and the neutron bomb stores. After two years, Zolfian and Yarvelling climbed out of a fallout shelter to find that a mutated Dalek which Yarvelling described to Wolfian as having "a brain a thousand times superior to ours", had crawled inside one of the war machines and used it a shell. Before they died of radiation sickness, the "machine Dalek" forced the two survivors to make more war machines. (DC: Genesis of Evil)
- This account implies that this same Dalek called itself the later Dalek Emperor. We do not know what became of the Thals after the destruction of the humanoid Daleks. Possibly, the Kaleds first mutated into the short humanoids, called Daleks, before mutating further. Yarvelling may also have re-created the plans originally made by Davros.
Behind the Scenes
The discrepancy between the various accounts of the Dalek's creation occured when Terry Nation, the writer of the first The Daleks, decided to revise their origin in Genesis of the Daleks (as he had already done in a short story, We are the Daleks! from the Radio Times 10th Anniversary Special celebrating ten years of Doctor Who).
The account of the Daleks' creation by Yarvelling and Wolfian comes from the story Genesis of Evil (also a working title for Genesis of the Daleks) by an uncredited writer or writers (quite possibly David Whitaker and/or Terry Nation himself). Future continuity has accepted the Genesis of the Daleks version, actually seen on screen, as the most accurate one.