The Silver Swan sits on a stream made of twisted glass rods and within a clear glass box. It preens and stares intently into its fabricated pond before swallowing up a little silver fish. When Mark ...

It’s fitting that the European renaissance of automata, or kinetic sculptures designed to mimic human movement, began with a clockmaker—like their timekeeping counterparts, automata operate on cue, ...

We usually think of robots as an achievement of the modern era. But this remarkable machine is proof that the resourceful inventors of the 19th Century had the technology to create their own automata.

For a moment, suspend your worldview and adopt Descartes’s mechanistic interpretation that living beings are essentially complex machines: a collection of inherently unrelated parts that move and ...

The developers behind “Bitcraft: Age of Automata” want you to build the world from the ground up. Villages, towns, cities, nations and empires are all in players hands. That’s how Clockwork Labs ...

Flesh and Machines How Robots Will Change Us by Rodney A. Brooks Parthenon, 260 pp., $26 Prey A Novel by Michael Crichton HarperCollins, 384 pp., $26.95 Dumbstruck A Cultural History of Ventriloquism ...

This essay is excerpted from Strange Frequencies by Peter Bebergal, published by Penguin/TarcherPerigree. In an enormous Goodwill in Seattle, the horologist (a watchmaker and expert in related devices ...