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

Wood, Gaby

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679451129 ISBN 13: 9780679451129

Publisher: Knopf, 2002

Synopsis

A rich and informative exploration of our age-old obsession with “making life.”

Could an eighteenth-century mechanical duck really digest and excrete its food? Was “the Turk,” a celebrated chess-playing and -winning machine fabricated in 1769, a dazzling piece of fakery, or could it actually think? Why was Thomas Edison obsessed with making a mechanical doll—a perfect woman, mass-produced? Can a twenty-first-century robot express human emotions of its own?

Taking up themes long familiar from the realms of fairy tales and science fiction, Gaby Wood traces the hidden prehistory of a modern idea—the thinking, hoaxes, and inventions that presaged contemporary robotics and the current experiments with artificial intelligence. Informed by the author’s scientific and historical research, Edison’s Eve is also a brilliant literary, cultural, and philosophical examination of the motives that have driven human beings to pursue the creation of mechanical life, and the effects of that pursuit—both in its successes and in its failures—on our sense of what makes us human.

About this title

From the Back Cover

“Distinguish[ed] throughout by astoundingly thorough research...Gaby Wood’s sprightly and imaginative book looks back to the time when science and entertainment, the study of life’s mysteries and the attempts to build imitations of it, were one and the same. Her book itself is an ingenious miniature, a charming tour through some odd comers of scientific and cultural history, the development of lifelike automata, the history of the doll industry, the origins of cinema. It is also defiantly–and deceptively–whimsical. In a few short chapters, Wood is taking on no less a theme than the industrialization of wonder.”
–Jennifer Schuessler, New York Review of Books

“Threaded throughout theses peculiar and fascinating stories are deeper questions about what it means to be human and what our historical desires to play God say about us; a philosophical area that is even more relevant today...The book is less about tracking scientific strides toward artificial intelligence and more an illustration of the earliest seeds of ideas and the processes that often blurred the lines between science and magic.”
–Cassandra Braun, Contra Costa Times

“In this fascinating book, Wood invites the reader on a journey of exploration through the history and development of what we commonly refer to as robots...This enjoyable book may affect you as profoundly as it did Mary Shelley: after viewing an early example of one of these mechanical marvels in the flesh, so to speak, she was inspired to write Frankenstein.”
–Netsurfer Digest

“[A] haunting and elegant book...Imaginative...[Wood] makes you share a historian’s delight in detail...Not the least of the pleasures of [Edison’s Eve] is the way it captures the thrill of this simple and profound game between the human and the inanimate.”
–Boston Phoenix

“Embodying the confusions between what is 'lifelike' and what is alive, robots have always held an anxious fascination...Deftly balancing historical detail with provocative meditations on the reception accorded such marvels, Wood traces the...exotic particulars [in the] development of imitations of life.”
–The New Yorker

“...Quirky, ambitious, well-researched...[Wood] splashes happily among fascinating stories about different creators and their creations, from an android that plays the flute to an artificial duck that defecates.”

–The San Diego Union-Tribune

“Americans may think of Thomas Edison as the great inventor of the light bulb, but he did have a flop or two in his lifetime, as Gaby Wood reveals. Her charming Edison’s Eve recounts the story of his attempt to make the first talking doll...Ms. Wood places this interesting failure within a history of experiments in automation...Examined as part of a continuum, these primitive robots raise the same questions: Why do scientists feel a need to replicate life? And why, when they fail, do they feel such shame?...The best parts of [Wood’s] history need no analysis.”
–John Freeman, Wall Street Journal

“Fascinating...A lively, elegant and surprising book, packed with curious details and enticing anecdotes.”
–The New York Times Book Review

“What makes you distinctly human? Is it your ability to calculate? To empathize?...Gaby Wood’s new book, Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life, engages the questions that have bedeviled philosophy since Descartes first mused that ‘the body is nothing but...an earthenware machine.’ It also traces the fate of the soul in an increasingly modern, secular, technological world. How does Gaby Wood manage to pull all this off so admirably, and with a minimum of Comp Lit gasbagging? To begin with, she scrupulously avoids words like ‘fate’ and ‘soul.’ Instead, she concentrates on a single concrete subject: the various attempts, beginning in the Enlightenment, to simulate human and animal life by building machines, or automata. Edison’s Eve is densely anecdotal and engaging, and almost frighteningly well-researched...[Gaby Wood] has written a lovely and often brilliant book.”
–Stephen Metcalf, The New York Observer

"In five entertaining chapters, British journalist [Gaby] Wood describes the ways humans have built machines to resemble themselves over the past three centuries. . . Wood's anecdotes are delightful. . . . She frequently reminds readers that these historical vignettes show the continuous struggle to determine what makes us human.
–Publishers Weekly

"A meticulous account of the search for mechanical life, which takes the reader up some unbelievably strange byways of 18th-and 19th-century intellectual history. It's the best kind of popular history-of-ideas book, in the same league as Longitude."
–Jonathan Coe

"A treasure trove of marvels and information. Wittily and cogently written, this unusual cultural analysis provides us with unsettling insights into our historic fascination with human simulacra through the centuries."
–Joyce Carol Oates

"Mechanical humanoids that could write poetry, play chess, tell fortunes, etc., may not have much in common with today's software-driven laboratory robots, but Wood finds the sentiments of compulsion and fascination to be a constant passed from tinkerer to cyberneticist ... A rigorously researched, clever, and obliquely feminist look at what happens over the ages when the Pygmalian complex is closeted in a well-equipped workshop."
–Kirkus Reviews

"Brilliantly unraveling the mystery of our fascination with the doll as projection of our secret self, Gaby Wood draws us into the fundamental challenge to our perception of what makes us human."
–Gloria Vanderbilt

"In [Edison's Eve] Gaby Wood writes, 'Can this machine think? Can it talk? Can it bleed? What part of ourselves, secret or otherwise, has it taken?' . . . This question is central to the book, but the surrounding voyage is a spectacular treasure trove of curious and well researched anecdote."
–The Spectator

"A masterly, elegant and thoughtful cultural history of the life-imitating machine. . . . Wood is scrupulous in setting these studies in the proper context of their time. . . . Deceptively simple and engaging."
–Lynn Truss, The Sunday Times (London)

"A rigorously researched and grippingly narrated weaving of tales of the quest for mechanical life. . . . Wood's pre-history of the robot is full of surprising detective work. At times it reads like a whodunit. . . .The wonderful anecdotal quality of Wood's narrative makes this a captivating read."
–Aura Satz, The Financial Times (London)

"Gaby Wood addresses her riveting subject with energy, clarity and a charming storytelling manner. [Edison's Eve] forces us to rethink the relations between gods, machines and ourselves."
–Ray Porter, The Times (London)

"The odd idea that machine intelligence successfully replicates deceit has a long history. Gaby Wood's new and magical tour of that history offers seductive glimpses of its major landmarks. . . . Along the way, Wood recounts her own quest for the secrets of the machine-makers, the weirdly obsessive artisans who devoted their lives to replicating living beings with clockwork and electricity, rubber tubes and air pumps. . . . Wood seems peculiarly sensitive to the fantastic flirtatiousness which envelops dolls, miniature machines, seemingly living constructs. . . . [An] exhaustive survey of our culture's automatic fantasies."
–Simon Shaffer, The Observer (London)

About the Author

Gaby Wood attended Cambridge University and has been a regular contributor to The Guardian and the London Review of Books. She is the author of a short work of nonfiction, The Smallest of All Persons Mentioned in the Records of Littleness, and is now living in London, where she is a staff writer for The Observer. This is her first full-length book.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0679451129
• ISBN 13: 9780679451129
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336