Metrop­o­lis, For­bid­den Plan­et, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Blade Run­ner, The Ter­mi­na­tor, Short Cir­cuit, Robo­Cop, Ghost in the Shell, The Iron Giant, WALL‑E, Ex Machi­na: there is a par­al­lel his­to­ry of cin­e­ma to be told entire­ly through its robots. That such a his­to­ry must begin with the work of Georges Méliès may not come as a sur­prise, giv­en that he invent­ed so many of the tech­niques of sci­ence-fic­tion film­mak­ing. But until recent­ly, we did­n’t actu­al­ly know that the cin­e­ma pio­neer who “invent­ed every­thing” ever put a robot onscreen. The evi­dence turned up among a col­lec­tion of “old and bat­tered” reels of film that were “from before World War I and had been shut­tled around from base­ments to barns to garages and had just been dropped off at the Library.” So writes the Library of Con­gress’ Neely Tuck­er, who goes on to describe the action of one of the films involv­ing “a magi­cian and a robot bat­tling it out in slap­stick fash­ion. It took a bit, but then the gasp of real­iza­tion: They were look­ing at ‘Gugusse and the Automa­ton,’ …