The First Robot in Cinema Was Lost for 128 Years. Then a Potato Farmer’s Trunk Showed Up in Michigan.

A potato farmer from Pennsylvania hauled a projector around small towns in the 1890s to show off this strange new technology called cinema. When he died, his reels went into a wooden trunk. That trunk spent the next century moving from attic to barn to garage. In September 2025 his great-grandson, a retired teacher named Bill McFarland, loaded the trunk into a Toyota Camry and drove it from Michigan to Virginia. The Library of Congress opened it up. Spliced into the middle of one of ten nitrate reels was a 45-second film nobody had seen in 128 years.

The film is called Gugusse et l’Automate. Georges Méliès shot it in 1897. It contains the first robot ever captured on film.

The Clue Was a Painted Star

Courtney Holschuh, an archive technician at the Library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, was peeling apart the reels frame by frame. Nitrate film stock is famously unstable, flammable enough to keep it in a fireproof vault. Of the 42 titles in the trunk, 26 got matched to known films. The rest were question marks.

Then Holschuh spotted a tiny detail on one reel. A painted star on a pedestal, center frame. That was the logo of Star Film Company, which meant Georges Méliès. The French magician and filmmaker made over 500 shorts between 1895 and 1912, most of them lost to fires, to neglect, or to the fact that nobody thought silent reels were worth keeping. Before this discovery only fifteen of his films had survived completely intact. Gugusse is now the sixteenth.

What Happens in 45 Seconds

The plot is what you would expect from a man who also invented the jump cut, which is to say bonkers. A magician (played by Méliès himself) winds up a life-sized automaton dressed as the clown Pierrot. The automaton comes to life, then immediately starts beating the magician with a walking stick. The magician retaliates by producing a cartoonishly oversized sledgehammer. He bashes the automaton over the head. Each blow shrinks it by half through a match cut, the kind of trick Méliès invented on the fly. By the end the robot is a doll he stomps into the floor.

The word “robot” would not exist for another 23 years. Karel Capek coined it in 1920 for his play R.U.R., where mechanical workers also rebel. Méliès got there first, in under a minute, by accident.

Why It Matters (More Than You Think)

Every story about robots turning on humans, from Frankenstein’s monster to Skynet to the replicants in Blade Runner, has a grandfather now. It is a 45-second clip of a magician getting hit with a stick. Douglas Menville and R. Reginald, in their illustrated history of science fiction cinema, called Gugusse “the most significant scientifically themed film of 1897” and suggested it might be “the first true SF film.”

The anxiety is right there in the frame. You build a thing. You wind it up. The thing attacks you. That loop has powered a hundred years of cinema, and it was invented by a guy who used to pull rabbits out of hats at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris. If you enjoy sprawling TV meditations on how creation can go sideways, our review of Beef Season 2 covers a more recent, less explosive variant.

The Nitrate Problem

Here is the part nobody talks about. The Library of Congress has 145,000 reels of nitrate film in cold storage, and they are all actively trying to destroy themselves. Nitrate shrinks, warps, goes sticky, and eventually ignites at temperatures as low as 41 degrees Celsius. The Culpeper vault keeps everything at 35 degrees Fahrenheit because even then the stuff is only stable, not safe.

Most of Méliès’ negatives were melted down during World War I. The French army used the silver in the emulsion, and the celluloid was boiled for boot heels. The man who essentially invented special effects watched his life’s work get turned into shoes. He died broke in 1938, selling toys at a kiosk in the Montparnasse train station.

This pattern keeps repeating. Old stuff survives in attics, not museums. The Anglo-Saxon ring a metal detectorist pulled out of a Lincolnshire field had been there for a thousand years. A Roman sanctuary with a bronze goddess got dug up under Frankfurt last week. The oldest dice in human history turned up in a cave. Important things have a way of being in the wrong place for a very long time.

The Potato Farmer Was the Real Story

William Delisle Frisbee was not a filmmaker or an archivist. He was a potato farmer and part-time teacher in western Pennsylvania who got curious about moving pictures in the 1890s and hitched a projector to his horse and buggy to show films in rural towns. Méliès was still shooting in Montreuil, outside Paris, coming up with tricks that would become the grammar of film. Frisbee was a field agent for that grammar in central Pennsylvania.

When he retired from the circuit he did not throw the reels out. He put them in a trunk. His descendants kept that trunk for a hundred years without knowing they were sitting on a piece of science fiction history. The curators at the Library of Congress named the donation the Frisbee Collection. Jason Evans Groth, who runs the moving image section, said it was “one of the collections that makes you realize why you do this.”

Watch It (It Is Free)

The Library of Congress digitized the film frame by frame over a week and put it online for free. You can watch all 45 seconds of it on their website. It is grainy, the edges flicker, the magician’s movements have that jittery quality early cinema always has because they were cranking the camera by hand. None of that matters. You are watching the birth of an entire genre, a genre that now accounts for something like half of all blockbuster cinema, and it started with a guy in a pointed hat and a walking-stick-wielding clown.

Vintage aesthetics keep clawing their way back into the present. The 1930s rubber hose animation style is now a hit in indie games, 2D cartoons filtered through modern engines. Méliès was doing that in 1897 with paint and papier-mâché and whatever his brother could buy wholesale. The tools change, the instinct does not.

The Trunk Is Not Empty Yet

Of the 42 titles in the Frisbee reels, 16 are still unidentified. Holschuh and her colleagues are working through them. Some will be Edison films, some industrial ephemera, some mystery stuff nobody can place. The Library does this work on a shoestring budget, which is depressing but also the reason it keeps producing miracles. If Frisbee’s great-grandson had called a movie studio instead of the Library of Congress, the reel probably would have ended up in a drawer in Burbank. Instead it is on the internet, watchable by anyone, forever.

A potato farmer’s descendant is about to throw out a trunk. Worth asking them to wait.