Videodrome is Motherboard’s weekly look at the weird old archival footage lurking around the web. Check out old posts here.I’m not going to wade into the Thomas Edison vs. Nikola Tesla debate (although isn’t it perfect that arguing about the two is the pretty much the most popular non-porn internet topic?), but this little gem of a silent film sure offers a lot of ammo to the “Edison was an asshole” camp. Filmed in 1904, “Dog Factory” features the wonderfully Calvin and Hobbes-ian “Dog Transformator,” a machine that turns dogs into sausages. But don’t you worry: Even though the set’s back wall is wreathed in dog links organized by breed, the Transformator can also turn those doggie sausages back into living pups!Thomas Edison’s company was apparently a big producer of moving images starting in the late-19th century, featuring the kind of goofball subject matter that evokes some dude with his first Handycam, rather than a supposedly-ruthless inventor. I mean, “Dog Transformator” sounds like the type of skit that led to Mad TV‘s sad decline. But Edison pretty much was that dude with a Handycam; Early movies and phantasmagoria aside, film was experiencing a boom in accessibility right around the time Edison’s company started production.And I suppose there is something serious about “Dog Factory” if you ignore the sheer implied violence of chopping pooches up into breakfast. Ford’s Model T wasn’t released until 1908, but “Dog Factory” hints at the boom of manufacturing innovation that was the end product of the Technological Revolution. Sure, it’s rather silly (and kinda horrific) to build a Dog Transformator, but the underlying promise was that innovation could produce anything in the pursuit of making production (and everyday life, really) more efficient.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.