Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life

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.

This is an excellent book about man's attempts to become "TheNew Prometheus "i.e. the "Creator " of artificail Life through automatons and robots. This book goes into great detailabout such curiousities and mechanicalmarvels such as "The Chess Player" and 'the Digestive Duck". This book goes to great lenghts to explore the connections between Theology, Mathematicsand Sorcery and offers insights into how through the Ages the notion that Man Is A Machine was hotly debated and ridiculed and dismiised as a type of "Heresy".I applaud Ms. Wood for her very thorough research and offering facts to the reader so thattheycanquestion his or her own views of this very interesting subject.

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.

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 FamousEighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine by Tom Standage. Equally strange & pleasurable.