Stop-motion animation has a long history in film. It was often used to show objects moving as if by magic, but really by animation. The first instance of the stop-motion technique can be credited to Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton for Vitagraph's The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1897), in which a toy circus of acrobats and animals comes to life.[2] In 1902, the film Fun in a Bakery Shop used the stop trick technique in the "lightning sculpting" sequence. French trick film maestro Georges Méliès used stop-motion animation once to produce moving title-card letters in one of his short films, and a number of his special effects are based on stop-motion photography. In 1907, The Haunted Hotel is a new stop-motion film by J. Stuart Blackton, and was a resounding success when released. Segundo de Chomón (1871–1929), from Spain, released El Hotel Eléctrico later that same year, and used similar techniques as the Blackton film. In 1908, A Sculptor's Welsh Rarebit Nightmare was released, as was The Sculptor's Nightmare, a film by Billy Bitzer. Italian animator Roméo Bossetti impressed audiences with his object animation tour-de-force, The Automatic Moving Company in 1912. The great European pioneer of stop motion was Wladyslaw Starewicz (1892–1965), who animated The Beautiful Lukanida (1910), The Battle of the Stag Beetles (1910), and The Ant and the Grasshopper (1911).