Technique is the essence of the human being. With the technique, human beings can obtain for themselves what they once asked of the Gods. A push to overcome one’s own limits that is projected into the ambition to create artifacts in one’s own image and likeness: this is how the automaton was born, a machine that moved by itself. Through the course of centuries, there were mechanical inventions of various types: self-propelled fountains, clocks which moved by the force of water, heat, or a particular mechanism, emulating human beings up to the recent zoomorphic or anthropomorphic creatures. They marked a long history from the Christian and Arab Middle Ages to the Italian Renaissance, with the ingenious designs of Leonardo da Vinci, up to the flourishing in Europe and Asia of creations such as the Jaquet Droz family of androids and the karakuri ningyo mechanical dolls of the eighteenth century. The playful dimension of the first automatons was rooted in the frontier technical knowledge of the time. In the industrial period, with the prevalence of the concept of machine utility over any other function, the wonders of these automata are to be considered as the parents of modern robots.