#Chess automaton series#

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A retired doctor of podiatric medicine, he lives in Naples, Florida. He has authored numerous articles for Chess Life and Florida Chess, written a chess column, and made live radio appearances as a chess expert. Levitt has been playing postal and over-the-board chess for many years. The complete collection of published games played by the Turk, many, again, unknown for 200 years, is also included. This work contains a detailed discussion of the literature surrounding the Turk along with an analysis of its hidden operation. Besides playing a good game of chess within an hour's time, the manipulator had to keep track of the moves, work the pantograph arm apparatus, nod the head, roll the eyes, cover up sneezes and coughs, and work the sound mechanism. In actuality, the Turk was manipulated by a man housed in a hot box, working by candlelight-but the secret was kept for decades. Its mystery snatched away, it was relegated to a warehouse, where a few years later, in 1854, it perished in a fire.With all-new research and facts unknown for two centuries, this is a richly detailed and comprehensive account of 'The Turk,' Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen's amazing but fraudulent Chess Automaton that held the world spellbound for 85 years beginning in 1770. So the Great Chess Automaton was not sentient after all, but only a hoax. Magnetic chess pieces allowed him to know what pieces were being moved on the board above his head. The operator then controlled the Turk by means of a 'pantograph' device that synchronized his arm movements with those of the wooden Turk.

#Chess automaton series#

Among the chess masters who served as the automaton's hidden operator were Johann Allgaier and Aaron Alexandre.Ī series of sliding panels and a rolling chair allowed the automaton's operator to hide while the interior of the machine was being displayed. The identity of the hidden man varied, but Kempelen and Maelzel tried to use chess champions, one of whom wrote the exposé. Hidden inside the box out of which the body of the Turk emerged (not in the body of the Turk, as Poe thought) was a full-sized man. The Secret RevealedThe real secret was revealed on February 6, 1837, almost seventy years after the automaton's creation, in a tell-all article published by the Philadelphia National Gazette Literary Register. There it again entertained and fascinated audiences, while regularly beating challengers. Maelzel reconstructed the automaton and toured with it throughout Europe before bringing it to America in 1826. But this was not the end of its career, because in 1805, after Kempelen had died, his family sold the machine to Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, a German university student. In 1790 Kempelen finally dismantled the machine and stored it away. The automaton even defeated Benjamin Franklin.

He typically invited audience members to challenge his automaton to a match, and these challengers invariably lost. Kempelen, who was a Hungarian nobleman, built the chess automaton in 1769 and toured throughout Europe with it, exhibiting it before audiences filled with royalty and aristocrats. This, in the words of its inventor, was an actual 'thinking machine.'

In other words, this was not a mere mechanical contraption, such as Vaucanson's duck. To top it all off, it was an excellent player. The Great Chess Automaton actually moved pieces on its own, planned strategy, and responded to the actions of its opponent. When wound up, the figure played chess against human opponents.īut this wasn't a machine that simply mimicked the movements of a man playing chess. The Great Chess Automaton consisted of a wooden figure dressed in Turkish clothes (and usually referred to as the 'Turk') whose trunk emerged out of a large wooden box filled with gears and wires. But no automaton was more praised or more famous than the Great Chess Automaton of Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen. The frenchman Jacques de Vaucanson built a mechanical duck that quacked, ate food, and defecated just like the real thing. Enlightenment thinkers were fascinated by machines called automata whose sole purpose was to mimic living objects, and they built some amazing examples of them.