Download or read book Edison s Eve written by Gaby Wood and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2002 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich and informative exploration of our age-old obsession with “making life.” Could an eighteenth-century mechanical duck really digest and excrete its food? Was “the Turk,” a celebrated chess-playing and -winning machine fabricated in 1769, a dazzling piece of fakery, or could it actually think? Why was Thomas Edison obsessed with making a mechanical doll—a perfect woman, mass-produced? Can a twenty-first-century robot express human emotions of its own? Taking up themes long familiar from the realms of fairy tales and science fiction, Gaby Wood traces the hidden prehistory of a modern idea—the thinking, hoaxes, and inventions that presaged contemporary robotics and the current experiments with artificial intelligence. Informed by the author’s scientific and historical research, Edison’s Eve is also a brilliant literary, cultural, and philosophical examination of the motives that have driven human beings to pursue the creation of mechanical life, and the effects of that pursuit—both in its successes and in its failures—on our sense of what makes us human.
Download or read book Edison s Eve written by Gaby Wood and published by . This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging and informative of our age-old obsession with "making life, " from Mary Shelley and Thomas Edison to the A.I. lab at MIT. Advertising.
Download or read book Tomorrow s Eve written by Auguste comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Take one inventive genius indebted to the friend who saved his life; add an English aristocrat hopelessly consumed with a selfish and spiritually bankrupt woman; stir together with a Faustian pact to create the perfect woman--and voilà! Tomorrow's Eve is served. Robert Martin Adams's graceful translation is the first to bring to English readers this captivating fable of a Thomas Edison-like inventor and his creation, the radiant and tragic android Hadaly. Adams's introduction sketches the uncompromising idealism of the proud but penurious aristocrat Jean Marie Mathias Philippe Auguste, Count Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, a friend and admired colleague of Charles Baudelaire, Stèphane Mallarmé, and Richard Wagner. Villiers dazzles us with a gallery of electronic wonders while unsettling us with the implications of his (and our) increasingly mechanized and mechanical society. A witty and acerbic tale in which human nature, spiritual values, and scientific possibilities collide, Tomorrow's Eve retains an enduring freshness and edge." --Descripción del editor.
Download or read book Edison written by Edmund Morris and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 801 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Morris comes a revelatory new biography ofThomas Alva Edison, the most prolific genius in American history.
Download or read book America in Literature and Film written by Dr Ahmed Elbeshlawy and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utilizing Lacan's psychoanalytic theory and Žižek's philosophical adaption of it, this book brings into dialogue a series of modernist and postmodernist literary works, films, and critical theory that are concerned with defining America. Ahmed Elbeshlawy demonstrates that how America is perceived in certain texts reveals not only the idealization or condemnation of it, but an imago, or constructed image of the perceiver as well. In turn, texts which particularly focus on demonstrating how other texts about America communicate an untrustworthy message themselves communicate an unreliable message, inventing and reinventing a series of imagos of America. These imagos refer to both idealized and deformed images of America constructed by the perceivers of America. The first part of this book is concerned with modernist perceptions of America, and includes discussion of Adorno, Benjamin, Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, as well as Emerson and Seymour Martin Lipset. The second part is dedicated to postmodernist representations of America, focusing on texts by Edward Said, Ihab Hassan, Susan Sontag, David Shambaugh and Charles W. Brooks, and films including Lars von Trier's Dogville and D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation.
Download or read book The Edisons of Fort Myers written by Tom Smoot and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1885, Thomas Edison, age thirty-nine and already a world-famous inventor, met the two great loves of his life: Mina Miller and Fort Myers, Florida. Mina soon became his second wife, and Fort Myers—a remote, almost inaccessible, village on Florida's southwest coast—became their winter home. Other tomes tell the global account of Thomas Edison, the American icon named by Life magazine as the "Man of the Millennium." This book offers a look at his life in his tropical retreat, his "jungle," where for forty-six years he and his bride sought refuge from the cold winters and the demanding lifestyle of his New Jersey home, laboratory, and business complex. While in Fort Myers he watched over his extensive botanical gardens, fished from both his boat and his long dock, interacted with the locals, and labored for many hours in his laboratory. Henry Ford and his family lived next door and many dignitaries came to visit, including President-elect Hoover and Harvey Firestone. The Edisons became an essential part of the Fort Myers story. They made lifelong friendships with townsfolk and joined in local activities until the love affair of the Edisons was cut short by the death of Thomas in 1931. Mina continued to live out her love for Fort Myers and its people until her death in 1947. She gave their winter estate, Seminole Lodge (Thomas' "jungle"), to the grateful citizens of Fort Myers.
Download or read book Literature and the Bible written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-12-18 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Thomas Edison written by Paul Israel and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-03-18 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most prolific inventor in American history, Thomas Edison played a major role in creating industries that have altered life around the globe: electric light and power, recorded sound and motion pictures. He also made significant innovations in telecommunications, battery technology, office machinery, the manufacture of Portland Cement, and processes for working low-grade ores. He was able to contribute to such a wide array of industries because he was not a lone inventor. At his workshops and laboratories in Newark, Menlo Park, and West Orange in New Jersey, Edison brought together teams of skilled research assistants and machinists. These teams allowed him to do more than any one person could do. In the process he transformed invention by making it part of a larger process of research, development, and commercialization that we now call innovation. That transformation—as much as any single invention—has become a crucial feature of the modern world. Includes a detailed chronology of Edison’s life and work. An introduction that provides an overview of Edison’s life and work. The A-to-Z section includes three hundred encyclopedic entries on Edison’s inventions, laboratories, business enterprises, public image and numerous individuals with whom he was associated. An extensive bibliography of Edison’s publications and select interviews; modern, contemporaneous, and juvenile biographies; and thirteen subject areas related to Edison’s work and influence. The index thoroughly cross-references the chronological and encyclopedic entries.
Download or read book Chronology of American Popular Music 1900 2000 written by Frank Hoffmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The field of Popular Music Studies is growing, but still lacks some basic reference materials. The Chronology of American Popular Music, 1899-2000 fills this gap by offering a comprehensive overview of the field. It will be a must-own for libraries and individuals interested in this growing field of research.
Download or read book Domesticating Electricity written by Graeme Gooday and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A socio-cultural study of the history of electricity during the late Victorian and Edward periods. It shows how technology, authority and gender interacted in pre-World War I Britain.
Download or read book Life written by John Ames Mitchell and published by . This book was released on 1882 with total page 788 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Love Sex Gender and Superheroes written by Jeffrey A. Brown and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-19 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Impossibly muscular men and voluptuous women parade around in revealing, skintight outfits, and their romantic and sexual entanglements are a key part of the ongoing drama. Such is the state of superhero comics and movies, a genre that has become one of our leading mythologies, conveying influential messages about gender, sexuality, and relationships. Love, Sex, Gender, and Superheroes examines a full range of superhero media, from comics to films to television to merchandising. With a keen eye for the genre’s complex and internally contradictory mythology, comics scholar Jeffrey A. Brown considers its mixed messages. Superhero comics may reinforce sex roles with their litany of phallic musclemen and slinky femme fatales, but they also blur gender binaries with their emphasis on transformation and body swaps. Similarly, while most heroes have heterosexual love interests, the genre prioritizes homosocial bonding, and it both celebrates and condemns gendered and sexualized violence. With examples spanning from the Golden Ages of DC and Marvel comics up to recent works like the TV series The Boys, this study provides a comprehensive look at how superhero media shapes our perceptions of love, sex, and gender.
Download or read book Women and the Machine written by Julie Wosk and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Julie Wosk examines the role of machines in helping women reconfigure and transform their lives. She takes her readers through a gallery of fiction and high and low art which depicts women in their association with machines.
Download or read book The Saturday Evening Post written by and published by . This book was released on 1904 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Artificial Generation written by Christina Parker-Flynn and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-19 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Artificial Generation: Photogenic French Literature and the Prehistory of Cinematic Modernity looks at nineteenth-century literary representation and film theory, arguing that the depth of amalgamation that occurred within literary representation during this era is a key aesthetic tradition that continues to inform movies and contemporary culture today.
Download or read book Science Fiction The Evolutionary Mythology of the Future written by Thomas Lombardo and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-14 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An evolutionary and transformative journey through the history of science fiction from the innermost passions and dreams of the human spirit to the farthest reaches of the universe, human imagination, and beyond. '...a grand vision of the role of science fiction in the progress of human consciousness.' Dr. Karlheinz Steinmüller, Winner of the Kurd Lasswitz Award
