A showman powers up a robot, which then grows out of control and attacks him. It's a familiar theme, perhaps the plot of any number of 20th and 21st-century robot tales, but this one is from 1897.
We've been obsessed with humanoid robots for a long time, more than a century in fact. While most credit Czech writer Karel Čapek with coining the term "robot" in 1920, we now have evidence of a robot run amok from one of film's first artists: George Méliès.
