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.