"The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Poe Edgar Allan)

magi constructed (of like material) a creature that put to shame
even the genius of him who made it; for so great were its reasoning
powers that, in a second, it performed calculations of so vast an
extent that they would have required the united labor of fifty
thousand fleshy men for a year.*(2) But a still more wonderful
conjuror fashioned for himself a mighty thing that was neither man nor
beast, but which had brains of lead, intermixed with a black matter
like pitch, and fingers that it employed with such incredible speed
and dexterity that it would have had no trouble in writing out
twenty thousand copies of the Koran in an hour, and this with so
exquisite a precision, that in all the copies there should not be
found one to vary from another by the breadth of the finest hair. This
thing was of prodigious strength, so that it erected or overthrew
the mightiest empires at a breath; but its powers were exercised
equally for evil and for good.'"

* Maelzel's Automaton Chess-player.
*(2) Babbage's Calculating Machine.

"Ridiculous!" said the king.
"'Among this nation of necromancers there was also one who had in
his veins the blood of the salamanders; for he made no scruple of
sitting down to smoke his chibouc in a red-hot oven until his dinner
was thoroughly roasted upon its floor.* Another had the faculty of
converting the common metals into gold, without even looking at them
during the process.*(2) Another had such a delicacy of touch that he
made a wire so fine as to be invisible.*(3) Another had such quickness
of perception that he counted all the separate motions of an elastic
body, while it was springing backward and forward at the rate of
nine hundred millions of times in a second.'"*(4)

* Chabert, and since him, a hundred others.
*(2) The Electrotype.
*(3) Wollaston made of platinum for the field of views in a
telescope a wire one eighteen-thousandth part of an inch in thickness.
It could be seen only by means of the microscope.
*(4) Newton demonstrated that the retina beneath the influence of
the violet ray of the spectrum, vibrated 900,000,000 of times in a
second.

"Absurd!" said the king.
"'Another of these magicians, by means of a fluid that nobody ever
yet saw, could make the corpses of his friends brandish their arms,
kick out their legs, fight, or even get up and dance at his will.*
Another had cultivated his voice to so great an extent that he could
have made himself heard from one end of the world to the other.*(2)
Another had so long an arm that he could sit down in Damascus and
indite a letter at Bagdad- or indeed at any distance whatsoever.*(3)
Another commanded the lightning to come down to him out of the
heavens, and it came at his call; and served him for a plaything