Living Dolls: a magical history of the quest for mechanical life Gaby Wood Faber and Faber, 278pp, £12.99 ISBN 0571178790

In 1950, the mathematician and wartime cryptanalyst Alan Turing devised a test that provides the basis for the modern concept of artificial intelligence. In Turing's "imitation game", a person and a computer attempt to persuade an unseen examiner, by virtue of their written answers to certain questions, that they are human: if the computer's responses are indistinguishable from the other player's, it is deemed to have passed the test. Turing predicted that, by the year 2000, 30 per cent of computers would pass his test; that none has yet succeeded does little to allay the enduring anxiety that the game identifies. "To distinguish a man or a woman from a machine has been the aim, or the fear, of all those who have observed androids for centuries," writes Gaby Wood.

Wood believes that contemporary attempts to devise robots capable of thought or feeling should be understood in the context of a long history of similar attempts, and she begins her account of the "quest for mechanical life" during the Enlightenment - the golden age of the philosophical toy, when the "ambitions of the necromancers were revived in the well-respected name of science". An extraordinary gallery of artists, writers, inventors and philosophers were inspired by "metaphysical stirrings" - a desire to create artificial life. Descartes built an automaton which he referred to as his "daughter". Thomas Edison attempted to mass-produce a speaking doll. But it is largely forgotten characters who emerge as the heroes of this book. The "reigning genius of the mechanical world" was a Frenchman called Jacques de Vaucanson, a "modern Prome-theus", who built a duck that appeared to digest and excrete its food, and a mechanical flute player that appeared to breathe, evoking in spectators the sensation that Sigmund Freud called the "uncanny" - "the feeling that arises when there is an 'intellectual uncertainty' about the borderline between the lifeless and the living".

Another celebrated 18th-century machine was the "Automatic Turk", a chess-playing automaton that miraculously won almost every game it played (it defeated Napoleon, and Catherine the Great was said to have been disqualified for cheating). Although the chess player was widely known to be operated by a man - or, on one occasion, a girl - this did not diminish its appeal. Wood argues that the chess player was "less an admirable piece of mechanism than a philosophical game" - like all robots, she believes, it presents a "fundamental challenge to our perception of what makes us human".

Living Dolls is a fascinating piece of social and intellectual history, reminiscent of one of Marina Warner's forays into the collective subconscious. It is saturated with evidence of Wood's wide and perceptive reading, and culminates in a remarkable encounter between the author and one of the subjects of her meticulous research. The Doll family were four hypopituitary dwarfs, or midgets, who made their living in the Ringling Brothers Circus, which toured America in the 1920s, and later found fame as Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. One of the family still survives - Tiny Doll, who is 86 years old, 39 inches tall and lives in a Florida suburb, "once home to more ex-Munchkins than any other place in the world". She is a living rebuke to the audiences who speculated that she and her brother and sisters were "mechanical dolls".

Edward Platt's Leadville: a biography of the A40 (Picador) won the 2001 Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and a Somerset Maugham award

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