Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life

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 story of ingenious inventors and their fantastical creations - of men who wanted to play God.