19th century silent film that first captured a robot attack
npr.org29 points by ynac 8 hours ago
29 points by ynac 8 hours ago
I worked on a massive audio (78s) digitization project for the LOC and it was a blast to see the process of how these archivists and their outsourced crews (like us) worked to maintain the human arts. It was an odd feeling, I never had a client prior to that make me feel like our work was so important.
Well, to be pedantic, if it's 19th century it would have to be an automaton. The word robot wasn't coined until 1923.
From the article
> (The word "robot" didn't appear until 1921, when Czech dramatist Karel Čapek coined it in his science fiction play R.U.R..)
The actual title of the short uses the word "automate", French for "automaton"; I suspect NPR simply used the more familiar word in their headline for clarity.
Oh boy, this takes me down memory lane.
George Meliese's silent films and automatons were at the core of the beautifully illustrated and written YA novel from the mid-2000s named The Invention of Hugo Cabret [0].
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_Hugo_Cabret
"[...] attacks a human clown with a stick."
Why does NPR call Gugusse "a human clown" ? He is not wearing clown clothes.
Gugusse looks more to me like the "mad inventor" of the robot, with a comedic bald head.
Agreed 100%. That's a mad scientist. I'll bet the coat with exaggerated tails was comically out of fashion as well.
The jacket just looks like a variant of “morning dress”. It’s the equivalent of a tuxedo for the daytime (wearing either at the wrong time of day used to be considered incorrect; see the selectively-sartorially-fastidious Jack in 30 Rock reacting to Liz’s surprise at his wearing a dinner jacket without some special event planned with, “it’s after 6:00, Liz, what am I, a farmer?”)
You still occasionally see them at state functions (Trump wore an infamously poor-looking one when visiting Queen Elizabeth in his first term, iirc, and you can find photos of people like Reagan in it looking a bit less uncomfortable). I think they were standard/required clothing for arguing in front of the Supreme Court through the 1970s or something.
It’s the kind of jacket one might imagine a stereotypical cartoon mayor of a town wearing for a daytime ribbon cutting… because, not that long ago, that’s exactly what they would have worn.
It’s an almost, but not quite, dead piece of clothing, but it was still quite familiar when this was made.