Long before electricity, craftsmen built machines that seemed to breathe, write, and think. Historian Simon Schaffer travels across Europe tracing the history of automata, the clockwork figures designed centuries ago to mimic living beings. He visits a small mechanical boy that can be programmed to write out phrases with a dipped pen, a chess-playing device that baffled audiences for decades, and the remains of an entire miniature automaton city built to demonstrate the engineering ambitions of its era. Schaffer examines the internal mechanisms of these machines directly, showing the gears, cams, and springs that produced motion once mistaken for something closer to magic or life itself. Along the way he explains why patrons and inventors poured such effort into replicating human and animal behavior in brass and wood, and what that obsession reveals about how early modern Europe understood the boundary between machine and living creature. The film treats these devices as serious engineering achievements, not curiosities, and makes the case that they anticipated ideas now central to robotics and computing.