Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life

Gaby Wood

Faber 12.99, pp253

Just over half-a-century ago, the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing, fresh from his secretive triumphs at Bletchley Park and the breaking of the Enigma Code, wrote a now famous essay speculating on the possibility of machine intelligence. Turing imagined what he called an 'imitation game'. A judge communicating by some kind of remote message system with two players would have to guess which of them was human. In the now familiar version of the imitation game, one player would be human, the other a machine. A machine would be intelligent if it could con the judge.

Very simplified versions of this Turing Test are now held as annual events, sponsored by an American manufacturer of disco dancefloors, with prizes for convincingly human machines and for convincingly human humans too. But Turing's first version of the imitation game was much more fascinating. He started by imagining a female and a male player, the judge having to spot the man. Then he would replace the woman with a computer. So the real task of the putatively intelligent machine, on Turing's showing, was not to pass as a human, but to replicate a woman pretending to be a man: a more tantalising task.

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. The Turing Test appears in her story right at its start, but then we're taken back to old-regime French silk factories, plush showrooms in Regency London, Edison's high-pressure 'invention factories', PT Barnum's circuses and the astonishing Paris cinema of the fin-de-siècle. 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.

Turing's story suggests, and Wood's anecdotes confirm, that these replicas have always been caught up with the erotic and the exotic. As in her previous work, devoted to the tragic career of early-nineteenth-century Britain's most famous dwarf, so here Wood seems peculiarly sensitive to the fantastic flirtatiousness which envelops dolls, miniature machines, seemingly living constructs. She concentrates on the uncanny aspects of these automata, less on their ribald wit.

Her history starts, as it should, with the mechanical duck manufactured by the eighteenth-century French entrepreneur Jacques de Vaucanson. Especially splendid was this duck's shit, perfectly faked. The automatic bird didn't defecate what it ate. Instead, in a masterpiece of enlightened chemistry, Vaucanson concocted some appropriately smelly faecal substitute. Wood reasonably guesses Vaucanson's own well-documented obsession with his guts was here turned into a stunning mechanical game.

A couple of years ago I met a brilliant English artisan who'd been hired to make a modern replica of Vaucanson's duck - most of our chat focused on just how this trick defecation worked. But spread out on his table were lumps of dead duck, bits of wing, tendons and feet.

Never far away from the mechanical joke is the threat of death and horror and Wood does not miss this lesson. Her stories always end in the dark. So she describes an automatic chess player first made in Hungary in 1769, in which a moving statue of a Turk seated behind a board atop an elegant cabinet would play, and almost always beat, the best human masters. The Turk got star billing until well into the nineteenth century, was memorably if unreliably described by Edgar Allen Poe, and ended its life in a fire at Philadelphia's so-called Chinese Museum in 1854.

Long before then, everyone knew there was a human director concealed within the Turk's cabinet, hidden by a useless but convincing set of gears. Wood carefully documents the Turk's life, but she's much more interested in that of its directors, some more than 6ft tall, trapped for hours within a tiny box. The best of them collapsed into alcoholism. 'Death came to put an end to his painful position', joked a Paris journalist.

The point of such tales, so Wood convincingly insists, is not so much to illuminate the capacity of machines to behave like humans, but to reflect on how people turn themselves into machines. She recalls that while Edison devoted huge efforts to building speaking dolls, it was the phonograph which he baptised his 'baby'. She describes a film made in 1902 by the French genius Georges Méliès, in which the cinematographer plays his own decapitated head powered by a vast set of bellows. She summarises the theatrical career of the Schneider family, the midget prototypes of Oskar in Günter Grass's Tin Drum, and stars of Tod Browning's notorious 1932 movie Freaks.

'Instead of wondering if automata were people,' Wood observes of these self-styled 'living dolls', 'people now asked themselves how such purported humans could contain the requisite machinery.' Audiences seem prepared to attribute the most remarkable capacities to machines because people so often behave mechanically. As in any exercise with the humblest calculator, we unwittingly help the automata along, fixing their errors and filling in the gaps in their performance, then wilfully attribute the success of our collaboration to the machine alone.

Wood repeatedly uses the story of Pygmalion as a key to unlock these devices' mysteries: the male gaze supposes it can animate the female replica it has fashioned. There is, too, a suggestive geography in these stories of living dolls and animate robots. They are often imagined as Oriental: Russian, Turkish, Chinese, hailing from a distant and suspect eastern world. There, so it is supposed, people cunningly make automata, they mindlessly behave like automata, and they wish fiendishly to turn the rest of us into automata.

Wood's journey inevitably ends in a modern Tokyo robotics lab, surrounded by machines which chew, dance, flinch or play the flute. Her historical sense makes her sceptical of the Japanese designer's claims that all this is utterly new. Instead, it belongs to an ancient tale of playful deceit and spooky ingenuity. This would be merely innocent entertainment were it not, as Wood's book well suggests, so entangled with more sinister themes of dictatorial exploitation and murderous engineering.

In the stunning 1927 film Le Joueur d'échecs, unexamined in Wood's otherwise exhaustive survey of our culture's automatic fantasies, the French director Raymond Bernard put the famous Turkish chess player, the original imitation game, into a story of eighteenth century liberation struggle. The wondrous machine is used to smuggle a Polish freedom fighter out of Warsaw, only to end up being ceremonially shot on the orders of Catherine the Great in front of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. As the bullets thud into the oriental automaton, it starts to ooze blood. Human limbs and metal gears mix in ghastly chaos on the snow-covered cobblestones.