by Gaby Wood (Author)
"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?
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 278
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 04 Mar 2002
ISBN 10: 0571178790
ISBN 13: 9780571178797