The Amazing History of FurReal Friends

Max Tinker found a cat on his grandfather's workbench. It had fur, four legs, whiskers, and a battery compartment.

When he ran his hand down its back, the cat moved.

That is where this book starts — with a kid, a slightly suspicious robot cat, and the only question that really matters: how did it know?

"It's fake."
"I wouldn't say that too loudly."
"Why?"
"You might hurt its feelings."
"It doesn't have feelings."
"Probably not."
"Probably?"

THE AMAZING HISTORY OF FURREAL FRIENDS is the story of how toy animals learned to respond to us. It is told the way a good workshop conversation actually goes: questions, wrong guesses, whiteboard diagrams, a lot of arguing about what words mean, and one unlucky toy dog that gets taken completely apart.

Across fourteen chapters, Max and his grandfather trace the whole chain of events hiding under the fur.

WHAT'S INSIDE

• Why a wind-up toy that walks straight into a wall is not the same as a toy that notices you
• What a sensor actually does, which turns out to be far less than most people assume
• How six sensors and a pile of simple rules add up to something that feels like a personality
• Why the original 2002 FurReal cat became nearly impossible to find in stores by Christmas
• How you hide a machine inside Butterscotch, the 40-inch pony a child could sit on, for three hundred dollars
• What changes when a toy has to walk somewhere instead of staying where you put it
• How you design a dragon when nobody has ever seen one
• What to do when a FurReal Friend stops working, and how to tell "broken" from "needs batteries"

Along the way: Tamagotchi in 1996. Furby in 1998. Sony's AIBO in 1999. Squawkers McCaw the talking parrot, Biscuit the life-size golden retriever, GoGo the walking pup, StarLily the unicorn, and Torch, the 2016 dragon that roasts an imaginary marshmallow.

WHAT KIDS ACTUALLY LEARN

This is an engineering book wearing a very convincing cat costume. By the last page, a reader has picked up ideas that transfer to every machine they will ever meet:

• Input and output, and the chain of events in between
• The difference between what you observed and what you assumed
• Why "it moves" and "it responds to me" are two completely different problems
• How to diagnose something before trying to fix it
• Why acting alive is not the same as being alive — and why our brains fall for it anyway

It also takes seriously a question most books skip: why do we talk about a machine as though it has feelings, when we know perfectly well that it doesn't?

A NOTE ON FORMAT

This is a book of explanations, not a picture book. There are no photographs or illustrations inside — the diagrams are the ones Max draws on the whiteboard, printed as text, the way he wrote them. The story does the showing.

WHO IT'S FOR

Curious readers roughly ages 7 to 12, and the adults who get asked "but how does it work?" and would like a real answer. No prior electronics knowledge is needed. Nothing has to be bought, built, or plugged in — though anyone who finishes this book and immediately goes looking for a screwdriver is behaving exactly as intended.

If there is an old FurReal Friend in your closet, this book will change what you see when you look at it.

This is an independent work of nonfiction. It is not authorized, endorsed, licensed, or sponsored by Hasbro, Inc.