AUTOMATOS II. Dummy. When Edgar Bergen was eleven years old, realizing he could throw his voice, he sent for a book by mail, The Wizard’s Handbook, which was filled with "secrets of magic, black arts, mind reading, ventriloquism and hypnotism." The talking puppet, jointed at the jaw, weighed forty pounds, his head a mass of pine, his spine, nine inches of broomstick, which, when he was astonished, would rise from his shoulders like a turtleneck.