A peek inside the Turk, from Joseph von Racknitz (1744–1818), hypothesizing how the Turk operated. (From Über den schachspieler des herrn von Kempelen und dessen nachbildung [About the Chess-Player of Mr. von Kempelen and its Replica], Leipzig und Dresden 1789.)

1770

MECHANICAL TURK

The Mechanical Turk was a chess-playing android created in 1770 by Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734–1804) and presented to the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa of Austria. The machine appeared to play an excellent game of chess, as it defeated players in Europe and the Americas, including such notables as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. The life-sized android, adorned with a robe, turban, and black beard, sat at a large cabinet with a chessboard at top and actually used its hand to move chess pieces. The secret of its operation was not well known for many years, but today we understand that the complex cabinet cleverly concealed a human chess expert who used magnets to move the pieces and various levers to move parts of the android. To deepen the mystery, Kempelen would actually open the cabinet doors before play to reveal clockwork machinery inside and apparently no visible space for a human to hide. Even if many people understood the Turk to be a sophisticated “trick,” it nevertheless caused people to wonder what kinds of work machines were capable of—and what human capabilities machines might replace.

Many inaccurate articles were written about how the Turk could have operated. For example, Edgar Allan Poe suggested, incorrectly, that the player sat inside the Turk android’s body. Interestingly, Charles Babbage, one of the fathers of the modern computer, was likely inspired by the Turk, as Babbage wondered about whether machines could “think,” or at least perform highly sophisticated computations, when he began to work on his mechanical computing machines.

Author Ella Morton notes: “Though the [Turk] ultimately relied on human behavior and a bit of old-fashioned magic, its convincingly mechanical nature was cause for both wonder and concern. Arriving smack-bang in the middle of the industrial revolution, the Turk raised unsettling questions about the nature of automation and the possibility of creating machines that could think. The fact that the Turk appeared to operate on clockwork mechanisms . . . contradicted the idea that chess was . . . ‘the province of intellect alone’.”