Your father, no doubt, occasioned his own death, by some act of carelessness of which Coppelius was completely guiltless. Let me tell you that I yesterday asked our neighbor, the apothecary, whether such a sudden and fatal explosion was possible in these chemical experiments?

'Certainly,' he replied…

Clara’s response to Nathaniel’s letter early in the story illustrates her astute assessment that he has mistaken a scientific catastrophe for something more sinister. Clara’s letter illustrates a contemporary view of alchemy as a dangerous and mysterious practice that is bound to end in calamity. Though she is compassionate toward Nathaniel, she suggests that it was his father’s own tinkering with dangerous sciences that caused his death. While Clara does not express personal fear of scientific progress, she views the dangers through a practical lens. In contrast, the experiments have impacted Nathaniel so deeply that he has constructed a complex and frightening story surrounding his father’s death that belies a deeper fear of scientific progress. Although Nathaniel is unable to understand his own fears, the story builds on them as his psychological condition deteriorates through the story and culminates in his falling in love with an automaton.

Many lovers … would request their mistresses to sing and dance a little out of time, to embroider and knit, and play with their lapdogs, while listening to and reading, etc., and above all, merely not to listen, but also sometimes to talk, in such a manner as presupposed actual thought and feeling.

In the aftermath of Olympia’s reveal as an automaton, people go to strange extremes to make sure their loved ones aren’t automatons as well. The idea of automatons taking the place of real people causes much discomfort among the general public in the story. Some are genuinely disturbed, while others take it more as a joke. But beneath those responses is the anxiety that a machine could take the place of a human being. There seems to be a fear of even more automata existing in the world and a fear that people will not be able to tell an automaton apart from a flesh-and-blood human being. The fact that Spalanzani is forced to resign from the university indicates that he has committed two breaches of etiquette against society by making influential people out to look like fools and unleashing a frightening new form of technology on the world.