The Library of Congress announced that it discovered and restored a long-lost silent film, which many consider to feature the first robot in cinema. Titled Gugusse and the Automaton, the 45-second clip was created by French filmmaker George Méliès around 1897.
Gugusse and the Automaton depicts a human clown in a clockwork shop who appears to control a robot by turning a crank. In a trope common in modern science fiction, the robot eventually gains autonomy and attacks its creator. The human responds by destroying it with a hammer.
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Library curator Jason Evans Groth believes Gugusse and the Automaton is the earliest depiction of a robot in a moving image, even though the term “robot” did not appear until 1921 in the Czech sci-fi play R.U.R.
Historians presumed the film lost until a donor from Michigan named Bill McFarland brought a box of about 10 reels to the Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in September 2025. The box belonged to McFarland’s great-grandfather William Frisbee, a potato farmer and schoolteacher who traveled by horse and buggy showing movies with a projector.
Library technicians spent over a week scanning and stabilizing the short onto a digital format as the crumbled nitrate film stock made it unsafe to run through a projector. While inspecting the footage, nitrate film vault head George Willeman identified a logo eventually revealed to be for Méliès’ Star Film Company.
Méliès also directed the famous 1902 science fiction film A Trip to the Moon, which shows a rocket flying into an anthropomorphic moon.
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