[HN Gopher] 19th century silent film that first captured a robot...
___________________________________________________________________
19th century silent film that first captured a robot attack
Author : ynac
Score : 39 points
Date : 2026-03-02 14:41 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| damnitbuilds wrote:
| "[...] 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.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Agreed 100%. That's a mad scientist. I'll bet the coat with
| exaggerated tails was comically out of fashion as well.
| bubblewand wrote:
| 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.
| pigeons wrote:
| the llm editing the llm writing it missed it?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > Why does NPR call Gugusse "a human clown" ? He is not wearing
| clown clothes.
|
| Strange of you to criticize NPR for that bit seeing as they
| didn't come up with that description for Gugusse. From the LoC
| page for the video:
|
| >> Gugusse the clown appears to control the actions of Pierrot
| Automate, a child-sized automaton standing on a pedestal. By
| turning a crank, Gugusse makes him march and wave a stick. As
| Gugusse turns the crank, the automaton gets bigger until it is
| the size of a grown man. Suddenly the automaton is controlling
| his own limbs. He hits Gugusse on the head with his stick.
| Gugusse pulls the automaton off the pedestal and picks up a
| large hammer. As Gugusse pounds the automaton on the head, he
| gets smaller and smaller. At the final stroke of the hammer, he
| disappears.
|
| So they're using the supplied description of Gugusse. If you
| have an issue with it, take it up with the Library of Congress.
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| Well, the Library of Congress entry notes him as "Gugusse the
| clown" and the Wikipedia entry[2] has a few citations (to
| books, I can't verify) that support it, but more to the point,
| "Pierrot" is a classic[3] stock character in e.g. commedia
| dell'arte. It says clown but I think our modern meaning of that
| word is a bit removed, and perhaps "harlequin" (another
| character[4]) is more what we'd say these days.
|
| 1: <https://www.loc.gov/item/2026125501/?loclr=blogloc>
|
| 2: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gugusse_and_the_Automaton>
|
| 3: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierrot>
|
| 4: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlequin>
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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
| technothrasher wrote:
| Well, to be pedantic, if it's 19th century it would have to be an
| automaton. The word robot wasn't coined until 1923.
| PeterWhittaker wrote:
| 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.
| johncessna wrote:
| From the article
|
| > (The word "robot" didn't appear until 1921, when Czech
| dramatist Karel Capek coined it in his science fiction play
| R.U.R..)
| mig39 wrote:
| You didn't read the link, did you? This is addressed in the
| article.
| ynac wrote:
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-03-02 23:01 UTC)