Description

Book Synopsis
The eighteenth century saw the creation of a number of remarkable mechanical androids: at least ten prominent automata were built between 1785 and 1810 by clockmakers, court mechanics, and other artisans from France, Switzerland, Austria, and the German lands. This title investigates two such automata depicting piano-playing women.

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"This deeply researched study restores Enlightenment automata to their original context of princely courts, protoindustrial craftsmanship, and bourgeois sentiment - and explains how automata later came to stand for industrial machinery, mechanical theories of organic life, and fatally accurate simulacra of human beings in the philosophy and literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Adelheid Voskuhl's panoramic study is a model of how the history of technology can illuminate cultural and intellectual history." (Lorraine Daston, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)"

Androids in the Enlightenment Mechanics Artisans

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    A Hardback by Adelheid Voskuhl

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      View other formats and editions of Androids in the Enlightenment Mechanics Artisans by Adelheid Voskuhl

      Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
      Publication Date: Publication Date: 31/05/2013
      ISBN13: 9780226034027, 978-0226034027
      ISBN10: 022603402X

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      The eighteenth century saw the creation of a number of remarkable mechanical androids: at least ten prominent automata were built between 1785 and 1810 by clockmakers, court mechanics, and other artisans from France, Switzerland, Austria, and the German lands. This title investigates two such automata depicting piano-playing women.

      Trade Review
      "This deeply researched study restores Enlightenment automata to their original context of princely courts, protoindustrial craftsmanship, and bourgeois sentiment - and explains how automata later came to stand for industrial machinery, mechanical theories of organic life, and fatally accurate simulacra of human beings in the philosophy and literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Adelheid Voskuhl's panoramic study is a model of how the history of technology can illuminate cultural and intellectual history." (Lorraine Daston, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)"

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