Article Great Chess Automaton
Type: Technology Hoax.
Summary: Centuries before IBM built Deep Blue, Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen built what he claimed was a “thinking machine” that could play chess against human opponents.
A woodcut of the Turk that accompanied Poe’s 1836 article. According to Poe it was a ‘tolerable representation’ of the automaton. Enlightenment thinkers were fascinated by machines called automata whose sole purpose was to mimic living objects, and they built some amazing examples of them. The frenchman Jacques de Vaucanson built a mechanical duck that quacked, ate food, and defecated just like the real thing. But no automaton was more praised or more famous than the Great Chess Automaton of Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen.
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. When wound up, the figure played chess against human opponents. But we’re not talking about a machine that simply mimicked the movements of a man playing chess. This was a machine that actually moved pieces on its own, planned strategy, and responded to the actions of its opponent. To top it all off, it was an excellent player. It almost always won. In other words, this was not a mere mechanical contraption, such as Vaucanson’s duck. This, according to its inventor, was an actual ‘thinking machine.’
Kempelen, who was a Hungarian nobleman, built the chess automaton in 1769 and then toured throughout Europe with it, exhibiting it before audiences filled with royalty and aristocrats. He typically invited audience members to challenge his automaton to a match, and these challengers invariably lost. The automaton even defeated Benjamin Franklin.
In 1790 Kempelen finally dismantled the machine and stored it away. 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.
Maelzel reconstructed the automaton and toured with it throughout Europe before bringing it to America in 1826. There it again entertained and fascinated audiences, while regularly beating challengers.
Debate About Its Mechanism
The means by which the automaton operated was a source of constant speculation. Before each show, Kempelen made a point of opening sliding doors on the side of the box to prove that it was occupied only by clockwork gears, and each time the automaton moved the noise of grinding machinery could be heard. Still, most people suspected that there had to be someone hidden in there, somehow. They just couldn’t figure out how. Perhaps, they theorized, it was a dwarf. But there were also definitely many who were convinced that the automaton was an actual thinking machine.
While it was touring America, the writer Edgar Allan Poe had a chance to watch it in action, and he wrote an article in which he tried to use strict logic to solve its mystery. He theorized that a man was hidden in the body of the turk itself. He was almost right, but not quite.
The Secret Revealed
The 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. Hidden inside the box out of which the body of the Turk emerged were full-sized men (they weren’t in the body of the turk as Poe thought). These men were usually chess champions, one of whom wrote the exposé. Among the chess masters who had served as the automaton’s hidden operators were Johann Allgaier and Aaron Alexandre.
A 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 operator then controlled the Turk by means of a ‘pantograph’ device that synchronized his arm movements with those of the wooden Turk. Magnetic chess pieces allowed him to know what pieces were being moved on the board above his head.
So the Great Chess Automaton was not sentient after all, but only a hoax. This disclosure proved its undoing. Its mystery snatched away, it was relegated to a warehouse, where a few years later, in 1854, it perished in a fire. Future generations would never again have the chance to match wits with the world’s first thinking machine.
References
- Carroll, Charles Michael. The Great Chess Automaton. New York: Dover Publications, 1975.
- Poe, Edgar Allan. “Maelzel’s Chess Player.” Southern Literary Messenger. 2 (1836): 318-26.
- Standage, Tom. The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine. New York: Walker & Company, 2002.
- Willis, Robert. An Attempt to Analyse the Automaton Chess Player of Mr. von Kempelen. London: Booth, 1821.
