Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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 book is all over the map. Reading along you discover a number of very interesting facts about early robotics, cinema, toy manufacture and circus life. The facts are never brought together in any meaningful way. There seems to be a thread that can be constructed from the journey from the initial attempts at artifical life in the early Age of Enlightenment to the modern world of robotic manufacturing and artifical intellegence. This thread is never investigated in this book. It is actually a series of disjointed tales all dealing with the perception of "life" in various intellectual climes. It just doesn't seem to come together into any sort of intelectually satisfying way.