It is hard to believe that the pursuit of artificial intelligence is not a phenomenon of the twentieth century. For over three hundred years, the boundaries between bodies and machines the natural and the artificial, the animate and the inanimate have been passionately explored. These explorations, beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth and increasing during the nineteenth century, have been all but forgotten, lost beneath the commotion of the modern day world. This book retrieves these lost histories, giving voice to the hopes, dreams, and fears of philosophers, medical practitioners, engineers, craftsmen and artisans who have all been fascinated by the interface between bodies and machines. The journey back in time unfolds with the mysterious advent of mechanical philosophies, which conceptualized the body and the surrounding world largely in terms of mechanistic interactions. These theories develop in intriguing directions and fuel experiments in such areas as material production and social punishment, spiritualism and mental health. From reanimating dead bodies with electricity, which led to the introduction of the electric chair, through to the use of machines to render hysterics and the insane fit for reintroduction into society, this book conveys the dark truths behind our relationship with machines. This book is not only an exceptional contribution to the history of technology but also to contemporary debates about humans and machines.

About the Author/Editor

Iwan Rhys Morus Lecturer/Wellcome Award Holder,Queen's University, Belfast

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

1 Introduction

2 'A Great and Difficult Thing': Understanding and Explaining the Human
Machine in Restoration England
Michael Hawkins

3 England and the Machinery of Reason, 1780 to 1830
William J. Ashworth

4 The Governor and the Telegraph: Mental Management in British Natural
Philosophy
Elizabeth Green Musselman

5 A Grand and Universal Panacea: Death, Resurrection and the Electric Chair
Iwan Rhys Morus

6 'Instruments to Lay Hold of Spirits': Technologizing the Bodies of Victorian
Spiritualism
Richard Noakes

7 Spot Watching, Bodily Postures and the 'Practised Eye': the Material Practice
of Instrument Reading in late Victorian Electrical Life
Graeme Gooday

8 Bodies, Machines and Noise
Jon Agar

Select Bibliography

Index