Watch “The Birth of the Robot,” Len Lye’s Surreal 1935 Stop-Motion Animation

Robots seem to have been much on the public mind back in the nineteen-thirties. Matt Novak at Paleofuture gives the example of a moment in 1932 when “the world was awash in newspaper stories about a robot that had done the unthinkable: a mechanical man had shot its inventor.” Despite being a typical example of the experimental-fictive journalistic style of that era, it nevertheless reflected “a time when robots represented something fearful,” and were indeed “a pote