In Georges Méliès’s 45-second film, a magician winds up a clown automaton. The machine promptly whacks him with its walking stick. The magician reaches for a sledgehammer, and the automaton seems to shrink with every blow until it becomes a tiny doll. That slapstick scrap was made around 1897—and the long-lost film turned up in a box of old, fragile reels brought to the Library of Congress.
The Library’s restored 4K scan is now available to watch online. It is a tiny time machine with a wonderfully nerdy payoff: the archive describes it as the earliest on-film appearance of what might be called a robot. More precisely, the title calls Méliès’s character an automaton, a clockwork stage creature. The word “robot” is our modern shorthand for a machine that fights back against its maker.
A traveling showman’s family kept the reels
The film arrived in a cache of about 10 reels. They were rusted, warped and in places crumbled or stuck together. No one knew exactly what they contained, and the nitrate stock was too fragile to run through a projector. The reels had traveled from basements to barns and garages before Bill McFarland brought them from Michigan to the Library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia.
McFarland’s great-grandfather, William Delisle Frisbee, had been a potato farmer and schoolteacher in western Pennsylvania. By night, he was a traveling showman. He drove his horse and buggy between towns, setting up a projector in schoolrooms, churches and civic halls to show early films, often accompanied by music from a phonograph.
After Frisbee died in 1937, his projectors, films and papers passed through the family. McFarland inherited the reels without knowing what was on them. A Michigan lab technician suggested he ask the Library of Congress to evaluate the collection. Then conservators worked through the fragile strips frame by frame.
Archive technician Courtney Holschuh spotted the unmistakable image of a magician and a machine in a workshop. The recognition transformed an unlabelled reel into Gugusse et l’Automate, a film by the French magician-turned-filmmaker Méliès and his Star Film Company. The Library announced the discovery in February 2026; its account says the reel was found the previous September and likely had not been seen for more than a century.
The automaton gets the last laugh—briefly
Méliès plays the magician, who winds up a Pierrot clown standing on a pedestal. The automaton turns the walking stick on its creator. Méliès then answers with a prop sledgehammer and a classic movie-magic effect: each swing appears to reduce the machine’s size. The film ends with the magician smashing the tiny figure into the floor.
For a modern viewer, the short is part comedy, part special-effects demo and part science-fiction ancestor. Méliès used a painted workshop backdrop, a fixed camera and the visual tricks that made his films feel like stage magic escaping into the frame. “Robot” is not a precise period label, but the central gag has a familiar sci-fi nerve: the inventor builds something that immediately refuses to behave.
The Library carefully describes the movie as the first appearance on film of “what might be called a robot.” That qualification matters. The film’s subject is an automaton, and no single 45-second short can carry the whole history of artificial beings in fiction. Still, it is remarkable to see a machine-man joke from cinema’s earliest years survive in a form viewers can now inspect for themselves.
A copy survived after many Méliès negatives disappeared
The print McFarland donated was not the original negative. The Library says it was at least three generations removed from the source. That distance is part of why the discovery mattered: fragile duplicates can preserve a movie even when the first-generation material vanishes.
Méliès made more than 500 films. Many negatives were melted down during World War I for their silver and celluloid, and he destroyed others after the war. Copies made for distribution—including pirated copies—helped some films survive. The Library estimates around 300 Méliès films are known today, with about 60 in its collection.
The same cache also held another Méliès short, The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match (1900), and fragments of Thomas Edison’s The Burning Stable. Conservators spent more than a week scanning and stabilizing the material so people would not need to risk projecting the brittle nitrate to see it. A family kept a showman’s old reels for generations; patient preservation turned one of them into a watchable piece of cinema history.
You can watch the complete 4K Library of Congress scan of Gugusse et l’Automate and read the Library’s account of the discovery. The featured image is a frame from the recovered 35mm print; the film dates to 1897 and is marked public domain on Wikimedia Commons.
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