Simply, the humanlike appearance of the automatons together with motion projects the illusion of a real and alive human being present underneath the porcelain skin of the machines. This illusion is hard to escape, more so because this heyday of automatons was before the invention and wide distribution of the cinema. The audience, unacquainted with tangible simulacrum of themselves moving right before their eyes, would have been awed and terrified. But the reason why automatons still have this effect in the present day because a video clip of the simulacrum of a human being is confined to the limits of the screen. The knowledge of the implausibility of the automaton being alive together with the undeniable similarity between the spectator and their alterity projects the complicated and mixed feeling of being threatened and amazed. 

Despite the familiar outer layer, automatons are comprised of series of toothed wheels that are converted into motion. The basic principles of how an automaton functions has existed since the late Roman Empire, which are basically the root fundamentals of how a clock works. This fact is demonstrated well in the movie Hugo, a movie based on the novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret: A Novel in Words and Pictures, which itself was inspired by none other than Jaquet-Droz’s automaton, the Writer. In Hugo, the main character Hugo has the skills of a watchmaker, gained through the teachings of his dead watchmaker father enhanced by his natural talent. Using the knowledge of the clockwork along with the aid of his father’s notebook on the workings of automatons, Hugo attempts and succeeds in giving life to a broken automaton that has significance to Hugo personality as well as in answering the posed question in this essay, of which shall be discussed in the later pages.