Overview

Living Dolls looks at humanity's age-old obsession with moving dolls and speaking robots, intelligent machines and bionic men. It tells the remarkable story of men who wanted to play god - of the inventors and magicians who laboured for centuries to simulate life mechanically.

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9780571214662

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In antiquity Daedalus made dolls with moveable limbs; Socrates said of them that 'if untethered they might take off, giving you the slip like a runaway slave'. In the 13th century the Dominican monk Albertus Magnus spent 30 years building a man of brass, and 400 years later a French inventor exhibited in London a 'Musical Lady' who played the harpsichord, coyly eyeing the audience, her bosom rising and falling as her fingers moved over the keys playing one of the five tunes in her repertoire. She was advertised as 'a vestal virgin with a heart of steel', and she was mechanical. When another inventor exhibited a 'writing automaton' in Spain, he was accused of heresy. It was understandable: here was man imitating God - and these were the first steps towards our modern quest for artificial intelligence. Gaby Wood tells the story with a fine sweep: the ups and downs, the successes and failures of the serious scientists and the 'magicians' who exhibited their mechanical people for profit - but were equally ingenious in constructing them. Along the way there are many eccentricities in the search for perfection - a mechanical duck which not only moved and quacked, but excreted - and a few surprises - a talking doll produced by Edison, for instance, not long after the invention of the phonograph. She ends with the cinema, and the breathtaking films of the Melies brothers, and with 'little people', the dwarfs who played in the American circuses of the 20th century: not mechanical to be sure, but treated as though they were. This account of mankind's 'quest for mechanical life' is thoroughly researched and engagingly told. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

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 has contributed to the Guardian and the London Review of Books, and is now a staff writer on the Observer. Living Dolls is her first full-length book.

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