Publisher's Synopsis
The remarkable story of humanity's age-old obsession with moving dolls and speaking robots, intelligent machines and bionic men. For centuries, inventors and magicians have tried to simulate life mechanically. Each attempt to build an android is a fundamental challenge to our sense of what makes us human: 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 twenty-first century robot express human emotions? Taking up a theme long familiar from the realms of fairytale and science fiction, Gaby Wood unearths the hidden pre-history of a modern idea. This is the true story of ingenious inventors and their fantastical creations - of men who wanted to play God.
