We’ve written a good bit about the promise and issues associated with automated driving, like Waymo’s recent issues understanding what to do around school buses. While these may seem like modern problems, like being able to tell what photographs were generated with AI or using the Find My… feature on your phone to see how far into your colon that earbud you swallowed is, people have been thinking about these sorts of issues for a long, long time. Over a century, in some cases.
As an example of this, I’d like to present to you The Automatic Motorist, a short film by Walter R.Booth, a magician and pioneer of early British cinema. He was a prolific maker of short films, which were full of early special effects techniques that combined live action, models, and animations. He was truly a pioneer of the medium, making what were then known as “trick” films, and was trying to outdo the famous Georges Méliès working in France.
The Automatic Motorist from 1911 is actually a re-make of a 1906 movie called The ? Motorist which touches on the same themes and has much of the same settings, like the rings of Saturn, as the later movie. But the 1906 film was just a sketch; the full realization is here.
You should take six minutes and watch it! I checked with your boss, they said it’s cool:
Pretty bonkers, right? The plot isn’t exactly complex, but it does raise a lot of questions. We start in an inventor’s workshop, where a robot seems to be being completed. Interestingly, this film actually pre-dates the use of the word “robot” which was coined in 1920 by Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots). Hence the title referring to this machine as an “automatic motorist.”
For some reason, there’s a newlywed couple there, too. Or just pre-wed, perhaps, as they’re still dressed in a wedding gown and um, groom-suit. Maybe they’re enlisting the use of this driving-bot for their honeymoon?
They get in a car driven by the robot, and the car is interesting in that I can’t really identify it. It’s almost certainly British and from, say, 1905 to 1910 or so, and the closest car it seems to resemble is one that has yet to be properly identified:
It could be a car known as a Regal, which often built cars from kits from other European manufacturers.
Back to the film; the mechanical driver is soon accosted by a police officer, who is, again for motivations that aren’t clear, handcuffed to the rear of the car by the groom and inventor, and then a local dog just absolutely clamps onto the cop’s ass like it was made of honey-glazed ham:
How did they get that dog to do that? I wonder if maybe they did pack that cop’s pants full of ham?
Before long, they end up on the moon, itself a very clear reference to Méliès famous scene from his 1902 movie A Trip to the Moon.
From the moon they head, naturally, to Saturn, whose rings provide an excellent circle track to drive on, though they soon end up inside the planet, accosted by Saturnalians bearing spears, and it’s all chaos where the cop gets left behind, but it’s okay because he seems to be getting on just fine with whom I presume is the Queen of Saturn:
The mechanical driver manages to return the newlyweds and inventor to Earth, or at least an ocean on Earth, where they encounter a lot of sea life and subaquatic volcanoes and other briny adventures.
Finally, a hunter shoots them down from the…sky? Yes, sky, somehow, and the newlyweds are finally back and safe, a bit tattered and wet and having had a hell of a honeymoon. It’s not clear where the car or robot or inventor are, but I’m sure they’re doing great.
Pretty fascinating stuff! I feel like Ridley Scott should take a crack at re-making this, using one of his milk-blooded androids as the Automatic Motorist.
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