If you’ve seen the movie Hugo (and you should), you remember the wonderful scene where a humanoid automaton is restored and goes into action, revealing an important secret. Georges Méliès found these machines fascinating. His 1897 Gugusse et l’Automate presents an automaton (played by an actor) in what has been called the world’s first film about a robot. Bill McFarland brought a box of old films from Grand Rapids, Michigan to the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Virginia, and one of them was a third-generation copy of Gugusse. Film historians had known it existed, but no one now living had seen it. The preservation experts digitized the one-minute film, which I’m sure must have been fragile, and it’s now available freely on YouTube and other sites.