The Wizard of Chess

In 1770, Wolfgang von Kempelen designed and built a machine that became one of the most important cogs in the development of modern technology and how it is portrayed in media - an automaton chess player known as 'The Turk'. This piece of ingenuity consisted of a life-size man dressed in Ottoman robes and a turban, holding a long ottoman smoking pipe, all to give him the appearance of an "oriental sorcerer" (Standage, 2002). He was attached to a large wooden cabinet, on top of which laid the chessboard.

Von Kempelen took his invention all over the world with him, pitting him against some of the greatest figures and chess players at the time, such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. 'The Turk' would often win, bewildering those who witnessed the defeat. And if a player would try and cheat, the automaton would wipe all the pieces off the board, immediately terminating the game.

However, the world's perception of this mystical machine was not quite as it seemed and the illusion was eventually shattered when a number of sources revealed the truth behind Von Kempelen's Turkish chess player. After meeting the machine in a performance in Virginia in the 1820s, Edgar Allan Poe wrote an essay called 'Maelzel's Chess Player' (Poe, 2020) exposing the truth behind the machine. In contrast, he also offers imaginings of a world where machines really could outsmart humans, instigating a new sub-genre of science fiction and inspiring works such as Ambrose Bierce's "Moxon's Master", a short story written in 1909 about an automaton chess player who kills its inventor in a rage after it loses a game. Its fictional legacy continues to appear in modern-day with movies and franchises, such as Star Wars, where robots and androids are self-aware with the ability to think for themselves.

Another man who was inspired by this invention was Charles Babbage, the creator of the first computer - the Difference Engine - in 1822. This was a very early automatic mechanical calculator that had storage (Freiberger, 2019). He too saw 'The Turk' for what it really was, but was motivated by it to see how a real calculating machine could be made.

Furthermore, the famous automaton chess machine also inspired a number of imitations, many still playing chess, but also others that would demonstrate different skills, including a figure, 28 inches tall, known as 'The Writer' that could write any message it was programmed to (provided it was under 40 characters). It was created in the early 1770s by watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz, and it functioned thanks to 6,000 moving parts and a system of cams which coded the movements of the hands in multiple dimensions. It is considered by many as the birth of computerised android (Zhang, 2015)

Automata was man's attempt at simulating real life through mechanical means. It was these complex mechanisms that allowed for great technological advances (Bedini, S. A., 1964). Von Kempelen might have just created another puppet controlled by a man in a box, however, its legacy is rich and has gone on to champion great steps in both technology and entertainment.

Bedini, S. A. (1964) Technology and Culture, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 24

Freiberger, P. (2019) Difference Engine | Calculating Machine, Britannica. [online]. Available at: <https://www.britannica.com/technology/Difference-Engine> [Accessed 06 January 2021]

Poe, E.A. (2020) Maelzel's Chess Player, Glasgow: Good Press

Standage, T. (2002) The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine, New York: Berkley Publishing Group, p. 22–23.

Zhang, J. (2015) Remarkable 240-Year-Old Doll Automaton Can Write Actual Programmable Text. [online] My Modern Met. Available at: <https://mymodernmet.com/jaquet-droz-automata> [Accessed 06 January 2021]