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Edison's Eve

By Gaby Wood

Product Image: Edison's Eve

Edison's Eve

By Gaby Wood

0 - Default Title
Description
During the eighteenth century, the inventor Jacques de Vaucanson created a mechanical duck that seemingly could digest and excrete its food. A few decades later, Europeans fell in love with "the Turk," a celebrated chess-playing machine built in 1769. Thomas Edison was obsessed for years with making a talking mechanical doll, one of his few failures as an inventor. In our own time, scientists at MIT are trying to build a robot with emotions of its own. What lies behind our age-old pursuit to create mechanical life? What does this pursuit tell us about human nature? In Edison's Eve Gaby Wood traces the history of robotics, from its most brilliant inventions to its most ingenious hoaxes. Joining lively anecdote with literary, cultural, and philosophical insights, Wood offers a captivating and learned work of science and history.
Product details
Binding:
Paperback
Number of Pages:
352
Release Date:
2003-07-08
Publication Date:
2003-07-08
Publisher:
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
1400031583
ISBN13:
9781400031580
Weight:
318 g
Height:
131 cm
Width:
204 cm
Thickness:
19 cm
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