num_pages: 253
description: "Living Dolls" tells the story of humanity's age-old obsession with moving dolls and speaking robots, intelligent machines and bionic men - and it gives the history of ingenious inventors and their fantastical creations. Could an 18th-century mechanical duck really digest and excrete its food? Was the "Automatic Turk", a celebrated chess-playing machine that toured around Europe, a fake? Why did the great inventor Thomas Edison go to so much effort to mass produce a speaking mechanical child? What happened to the family of midgets who pretended to be dolls? And how can a 21st-century robot express human emotions?
language: English
title: Living Dolls : A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life
titlecomplete: Living Dolls : A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life
genres: Robots, Steampunk, Historical, Nonfiction, History, Cyberpunk, Technology, History Of Science, Science, Cultural Studies
ratings_count: 315
awards: awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: General Nonfiction
publisher: Faber