Some 1905 Cyborgs

At one point in his autobiography, Speak, Memory, Nabokov remembers being five (in 1904) and meeting one of his father's friends, General Kuropatkin:

To amuse me, he spread out a handful of matches on the divan where he was sitting, placed ten of them end to end to make a horizontal line and said: ‘This is the sea in calm weather.’ Then he tipped up each…