Living Dolls
Subtitle: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life
Publisher: Faber & Faber; Faber and Faber
Published: January 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 278
ISBN-13: 9780571178797
Subjects: History of engineering & technology; History of specific subjects; Inventions & inventors; Robotics; Technology & Industrial Arts
Description: "Living Dolls is a true history of ingenious inventors and their fantastical creations - of men who wanted to play God." "Could an eighteenth-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 twenty-first-century robot express human emotions?" "Living Dolls looks at humanity's age-old obsession with moving dolls and speaking robots, intelligent machines and bionic men."--BOOK JACKET.