The eyes of the crowd are fixated on the smallest movements of the boy. The boy looks, at the very most, around five years old and sits by a desk just big enough to allow him to carry out the task at hand. He writes out the phrase skillfully letter by letter. He also knows when to dip the goose feather back into the ink and to give it a shake or two to prevent smudging on the paper. The boy never looks up to the crowd. His eyes follow where he is writing, concentrating not to make a mistake. Indeed he doesn’t. 

This boy is a creation of Pierre Jaquet-Droz, an eighteenth century Swiss watchmaker. Jaquet-Droz made a set of three automatons, “The Writer”, “The Draughtsman” and “The Musician” as a collaborative effort together with his son Henri-Louise and Jean-Frederic Leschot. Among the three, “The Writer” is the most complicated, composed of 6000 pieces intricately working together to enact the lifelikeness of the automaton.

Like it is done in the above video clip, every time the demonstration of the Writer is over, Jaquet-Droz would reveal the inside of the young prodigy. The way that the series of lifeless toothed wheels can create movements so close to that of a human being has been and is still fascinating to the audience of automatons. Why are these lifeless yet so lifelike creatures so fascinating to us? What is the source of this fascination? 

The answers to these questions will be distinctively different from that of the creator of the automatons to the audience of the creations. This contrast comes from the fact that the relationship between them and the machine is clearly dissimilar. The creator is a god-like figure that brings the automaton to life restricts its action restricted by the set confinements. However, the connection between the machine and the audience is similar to that of the actor on stage and his spectator. As the performance of the actor leaves an impression on the spectator by triggering emotions and memories, the lifelike maneuvers of the automatons impress the audience with the similitude of the appearance and the sharp disparity of their true nature.