Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life

by Gaby Wood (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2002

  $3.28

  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?

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $8.07

  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?