The website of Colin Mayhew offered details on how this eccentric, but apparently brilliant, engineer had built an "autonomous crash-preventing robot" from the body of a BMW Mini Cooper r50. Video showed the humanoid robot in action, stopping a car from crashing into a wall. The Mini Cooper Autonomous Robot was eventually revealed to be an elaborate viral marketing campaign designed to promote the new Mini Cooper. More >>>

Joice Heth was an elderly black woman whom a young P.T. Barnum put on display in 1835, advertising that she was the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington. Heth entertained audiences with tales about the young George Washington, and her exhibition drew substantial attention.

When the public's interest in her waned, Barnum rekindled its curiosity by spreading a rumor that Joice Heth was actually not a person at all, but instead a mechanical automaton. People then revisited the exhibit to determine for themselves whether she was an automaton or a real person. Barnum displayed her until February 19, 1836, on which day she died.

But even in death Barnum continued to use her to draw crowds. He allowed a public autopsy to be performed on her body, supposedly for the purpose of verifying her age. Unfortunately for Barnum, the doctor who performed the autopsy declared she could not have been older than eighty. Barnum struck back by planting a story in the New York Herald (February 27, 1836) explaining that the body that had been autopsied had not actually been the body of Joice Heth.

Barnum's collaborator in the scheme, Levi Lyman, later added another chapter to the saga by supplying the Herald with what he claimed was the real Joice Heth story. This ran in the Herald beginning on September 8, 1836 in a series of six articles. In this article, Lyman claimed that Barnum had discovered the elderly black woman on a plantation and had taught her to pretend she had been George Washington's nurse. But again, this story was also false. The truth was that Barnum had not found Heth on his own. Instead, he had simply bought the rights to exhibit Joice Heth from another showman. He had never coached her.

Centuries before IBM built Deep Blue, its chess-playing supercomputer, Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen built what he claimed was a "thinking machine" that could play chess against human opponents. Not only that, but it consistently won.

Kempelen, a Hungarian nobleman, unveiled his chess automaton in 1769 and toured throughout Europe with it. He exhibited it before audiences filled with royalty and aristocrats. The machine consisted of a wooden figure dressed in Turkish clothes (for which reason it was popularly known as "The Turk") whose trunk emerged out of a large wooden box filled with gears and wires. The figure would play chess after its clockwork machinery was wound up.

There was much speculation about how the machine worked. Many theorized there was a dwarf hidden inside it. However, Kempelen always insisted that it really was a thinking machine.

Kempelen dismantled the machine in 1790, but it was subsequently acquired by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, who toured throughout Europe and America with it during the first decades of the nineteenth century. On its American tour, Edgar Allan Poe observed it and wrote an article in which he attempted to solve its mystery. Poe theorized that a man was hidden in the body of the Turk. He was almost right. The truth was that a full-size man was hidden in the machine, but he was concealed in the wooden box, not in the torso of the wooden figure. The hidden man could control the Turk via a series of levers and wires. He was also usually a chess master, which is why the Turk consistently won its matches. More >>>