Living Dolls by Gaby Wood
"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 tells the remarkable true history of how ingenious inventors and magicians laboured for centuries to simulate life mechanically
Gaby Wood was born in 1971. She read French at Cambridge University and is the author of a short work of non-fiction. The Smallest of All Persons Mentioned in the Records of Littleness. She is now a staff writer on the Observer. This is her first full-length book.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780571178797 |
| ISBN 10 | 0571178790 |
| Title | Living Dolls |
| Author | Gaby Wood |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Faber & Faber |
| Year published | 2002-03-04 |
| Number of pages | 240 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |