Oh god; i'm going to have recurring nightmares of that mechanical little lord faunteroy for the rest of my life.

Oh, that's so cool to see the thing in action. We read a little bit about this in a class I just finished up, Political Economy of Media. What we read specifically was a chunk of The Human Motor by this dude Anson Rabinbach. He talks about the creation of these elaborate automota as the endgame of the search for the "life force" and the quest to create the perpetuum mobile or whatever, before the blossoming of physiology as a scientific discipline. So it's pretty cool where these creations fit into the history of science, based on the little bit I've read.

Oh, they definitely fit into the history of science. Check out some of the stuff Liebniz was doing a hundred years earlier, too. Or read Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle if you want to have some fun at the same time.

Oh, Stephenson gets into this shit? I guess I'll have to. I've passed over used copies of cryptonomicon several times recently, but I know where to find them.

Cryptonomicon is good too, but doesn't go farther back than WWII. But it's definitely shorter than The Baroque Cycle.

Oh, it's not part of the series, I thought it was. Well I think the Strand has cheap new copies of the Baroque Cycle, so I'm still in good shape.

Cryptonomicon is related to The Baroque Cycle in several ways, and you certainly would do no harm starting there, especially if you find code-breaking and the founding of modern computing interesting. The Baroque Cycle is much broader in scope, essentially covering the emergence of modern science and economics, with a little bit of early computing thrown in. They're both fun, but Cryptonomicon is probably more so just because of its length, i.e., not being 2500 pages long like The Baroque Cycle's three volumes.