Living dolls : a magical history of the quest for mechanical life

Abstract

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?