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  • Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life
  • Julie Wosk (bio)
Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life. By Gaby Wood. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. Pp. xxviii+304. $14.

Edison's Eve at first looks like a study of androids and automata. In the opening chapter, Gaby Wood concentrates on famed eighteenth-century "philosophical toys" such as Vaucanson's eating and excreting duck, Jaquet-Droz's mechanical woman, who heaved her chest and played a harpsichord, and von Kempelen's Automaton Chess Player, with its wondrous ability to outmaneuver expert players (a report published in 1834 confirmed what many had suspected all along: the automaton had a human "director" hidden inside). But the book turns out to be much more, as the words "a magical history" in its subtitle signal.

Wood is fascinated by the cultural history and technological workings of these mechanical figures, but her real interest, a theme repeated throughout the book, is magic, an arena where the boundary between human and machine becomes blurred, leaving us with feelings of wonder and even anxiety as we experience what Freud called "the uncanny"—when we cannot tell whether an inanimate being is really alive, whether a figure is human or an automaton. As Wood puts it, it is the uncertainty that comes when we ask, [End Page 897] "What is the difference between a person and a machine? What is the line between a child and a doll, between animate and inanimate . . . ?" (p. 6).

Wood's first three chapters rely on both speculation and sleuthing in looking at three different versions of "mechanical life." The first, "Blood of the Android," considers eighteenth-century automata. The second probes von Kempelen's chess player (1769), and Wood hunts down many of the theories and stories that swirled around this mysterious figure, often known as "the Turk." The third, "Journey to the Perfect Woman," focuses on the talking doll that Thomas Edison manufactured from 1889 until 1891. The doll's metal torso housed a miniature phonograph with wax cylinders, and a voice—recorded by girls working for Edison—sang nursery rhymes like "Mary Had a Little Lamb." Wood spends pages on Edison's correspondence with businessmen, but perhaps more interesting is her discussion of the way children sometimes considered the dolls to be real, and her thoughts on Edison's attitudes toward women, whom he envisioned as "perfectible creatures, machines, or products." In an early Good Housekeeping article on electricity, he wrote that electricity "will develop woman to that point where she can think straight" (p. 147).

In her last two chapters Wood leaves behind this relatively conventional study and heads off into more idiosyncratic territory. The chapter titled "Magical Mysteries, Mechanical Dreams" considers the emergence of the cinema, including the opening of Edison's first Kinetoscope parlor in New York in 1894 and the career of French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Wood argues that "Cinema was a direct descendent of the androids of the Enlightenment," and that into the world of automata "came another mechanized monster: the celluloid frames of the cinema, edited together by technological Frankensteins and brought to life. On film, man was made mechanical, reproduced over and over, like an object in a factory, and granted movement by the cranking of a machine" (pp. 168, 173).

Wood's final chapter, perhaps the most personal and idiosyncratic of all, considers a group of stage performers known as "The Dancing Dolls," German-born siblings named Schneider, all of whom were midgets or dwarfs, who performed at Coney Island and in the Ringling Brothers Circus and also appeared in Hollywood movies (four appeared as Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz). Audiences sometimes thought they were mechanical, not human. Wood describes tracking down the last surviving family member, the aged Tiny Doll, and making the tearful discovery that she "is only human. She is a person with emotions and rights," not an object, not a doll (pp. 261-62).

In her introduction, Wood states that her topic is the anxiety evoked by "all androids from the earliest moving dolls to the most sophisticated robots" and adds that "mixed in...

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