Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life
NB: This is a secondhand book in very good condition. See our FAQs for more information. Please note that the jacket image is indicative only. A description of our secondhand books is not always available. Please contact us if you have a question about this title.
Author: Gaby Wood
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 240
"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?
Author: Gaby Wood
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 240
"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?
Description
NB: This is a secondhand book in very good condition. See our FAQs for more information. Please note that the jacket image is indicative only. A description of our secondhand books is not always available. Please contact us if you have a question about this title.
Author: Gaby Wood
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 240
"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?
Author: Gaby Wood
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 240
"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?
Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life