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Product Description
During the eighteenth century, the inventor Jacques de Vaucanson created a mechanical duck that seemingly could digest and excrete its food. A few decades later, Europeans fell in love with “the Turk,” a celebrated chess-playing machine built in 1769. Thomas Edison was obsessed for years with making a talking mechanical doll, one of his few failures as an inventor. In our own time, scientists at MIT are trying to build a robot with emotions of its own.
What lies behind our age-old pursuit to create mechanical life? What does this pursuit tell us about human nature? In Edison’s Eve Gaby Wood traces the history of robotics, from its most brilliant inventions to its most ingenious hoaxes. Joining lively anecdote with literary, cultural, and philosophical insights, Wood offers a captivating and learned work of science and history.
What lies behind our age-old pursuit to create mechanical life? What does this pursuit tell us about human nature? In Edison’s Eve Gaby Wood traces the history of robotics, from its most brilliant inventions to its most ingenious hoaxes. Joining lively anecdote with literary, cultural, and philosophical insights, Wood offers a captivating and learned work of science and history.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Magical it's not.
Factually accurate (probably). I found the facts interesting, but I was expecting some decent illustrations, rather than the few tiny photographs and diagrams which were almost unintelligible.
The "Quest for mechanical life" is extended to include real life in Hollywood at the making of "Freaks" and "The wizard of Oz" - interesting facts in themselves, but nothing to do with automata.
Factually accurate (probably). I found the facts interesting, but I was expecting some decent illustrations, rather than the few tiny photographs and diagrams which were almost unintelligible.
The "Quest for mechanical life" is extended to include real life in Hollywood at the making of "Freaks" and "The wizard of Oz" - interesting facts in themselves, but nothing to do with automata.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This was one of the worst written books I have come across for some considerable time. It reads like a school project and is devoid of both original thought and historical knowledge. The greatest mystery is how a respectable firm could publish and disseminate such drivel ...
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5 reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Fascinating read.
5 Mar 2003
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a great book for anyone interested in automata - and that includes computer people interested in artificial language, philosophers interested in what makes us human, cultural anthropologists interested in the interaction of humans and machines, and poets interested in all of the above. If you like this, try also The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous
Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine by Tom Standage. Equally strange & pleasurable.
Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine by Tom Standage. Equally strange & pleasurable.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
An Anecdotal, Quirky History
28 July 2003
Format:Paperback
Edison's Eve (Edison's attempt to create a successful talking doll) is both the title of Gaby Wood's book and one of the centrepiece chapters of this journey on the quest for mechanical life. Other chapters concern the Doll Family of midgets, the movies of Melies, the automatons of Vaucanson and the deception of the chess playing Turk (not an actual automaton). These pieces do not always blend together smoothly but the author works very hard to connect all the dots. On their own, though, each chapter is fascinating and filled with memorable anecdotes and will have the reader looking at the world in a different way. An enjoyable read.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
mechanical humans: an ironic look
28 July 2007
Format:Paperback
Recounting in successive biographic episodes the ultimately pathetic efforts of men to build, with their own hands, artificial humans, Gaby Wood offers a uniquely female perspective. Especially since the mechanicals were often meant to be women. Although very learned, the author does not aim at an engineering evaluation. Rather, the stories she tells will elicit in psychologically sensitive readers a mixture of laughter and horror. As was the case with the audiences in front of which these creatures were presented, readers will first be fascinated but then will turn away in revulsion.
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