The 18th century chess-playing automaton, commonly known as "The Turk", built by the miraculous Hungarian Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1769 to impress the Empress Maria Theresa is one of the most curious "living dolls" ever created. This is not simply because the Turk played chess so well that he was able to defeat pretty much all of his opponents during his grand tour of the world without revealing his secret and with spectacular performances. I am not even going to exaggurate the amusing claim of the automaton over the dearest features of our beloved human subjectivities: sharp reasoning, elegantly performing bodies and ability to speak (The Turk was capable of saying 'echec' at appropriate moments in the game). What is particularly fascinating about this automaton, this "android", is his complex cultural biography with which so many human lives, objects, and spaces became entangled over the years until it was finally burnt in a museum in Philadelphia (of all places) in 1854. Over the course of his 85-years of exhausting chess-carreer, The Turk met Edgar Allen Poe in Richmond Virginia in mid-1830s (Lewitt 2000: 226), defeated Napoleon Bonaparte in 1809 in Schonburnn (Standage 2002: 105) and Benjamin Franklin in 1783 in Paris. Charles Schmidt, a chess-player who hid in the Turk operating the machine, accused the Turk for "ruining his life" (Knappett 2005: 28). Several biographies of the Turk have been published (most recently Levitt 2000 and Standage 2002).
The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine
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The story of the Turk then is rich in arguing for issues of materiality, agency, performance and biography. The material presence of the Turk in various settings, enhanced with an eerie aura of a moving, living, reasoning doll, and its representational complexity in its Oriental persona, was first of all constituting the source of its social power. The maker of the automaton went into great pains in proving that there was noone hiding in the mechanism during the performances, and for years and years, noone could really figure out how it really worked. Alfred Gell refers to this aura "the enchantment of technology", or "the spectacle of unimaginable virtuosity." Similar thing when we are overwhelmed with the spectacularity of stone carving technologies at Egyptian pyramids. At times, even when von Kempelen tried to hide the machine from frequent public appearances, the Turk quickly became famous. If agency is defined as "the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act" then the Turk was able to take over its own biography, impacting large groups of people across the world. With its performances, its material existence, the automaton was an undeniably heterogenous phenomenon, where human intentionality, magical power of the Oriental other, chess as a political game of the kings, social performance in the public sphere were all gathered, overlapped, woven together.
At the time, elaborate mechanical toys were a popular form of entertainment in the courts of Europe, though the technology they embodied was soon to be put to more serious uses. So Kempelen intended his chess-playing machine to do little more than amuse the court and advance his career by impressing the empress. But instead his automaton unexpectedly went on to achieve widespread fame throughout Europe and America, bringing Kempelen both triumph and despair. During its eighty-five-year career the automaton was associated with a host of historical figures, including Benjamin Franklin, Catherine the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, Charles Babbage, and Edgar Allan Poe. It was the subject of numerous stories and anecdotes and inspired many legends and outright fabrications, the truth of many of which will never be known. The chess player was, in fact, destined to become the most famous automaton in history. And along the way, Kempelen's work would unwittingly help to inspire the development of the power loom, the telephone, the computer, and the detective story.
To modern eyes, in an era when it takes a supercomputer to defeat the world chess champion, it seems obvious that Kempelen's chess-playing machine had to have been a hoax--not a true automaton at all but a contraption acting under the surreptitious control of a human operator, like a puppet dancing on a string. How, after all, would it have been possible to build a genuine chess-playing machine using eighteenth-century clockwork and mechanical technology? But during the eighteenth century automata of extraordinary ingenuity were being constructed and exhibited across Europe, including Jacques de Vaucanson's mechanical duck, Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz's harpsichord player, and John Joseph Merlin's dancing lady. Mechanical devices seemed to offer limitless new technological possibilities. So the notion that Kempelen's machine really could play chess did not seem totally out of the question.
In a recent article for the BBC News, Adam Gopnik reflects on the persistent allure of the Turk, a chess-playing automaton that fascinated eighteenth-century spectators across Europe and America. The Turk was created by Viennese inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen and first appeared in the court of Empress Maria Theresa. Essentially an early type of robot, the contraption featured a large wooden cabinet with a chessboard on top behind which sat the torso of a mustached man dressed in oriental robes. Before every performance, in order to convince the audience that the Turk really was a machine, the operator, first Kempelen and then later Johann Maelzel, would go through an elaborate demonstration of opening the cabinet doors to reveal the complex, whirring jumble of wheels and cogs that powered the machine. Once the cabinet was closed, an audience member would be invited to challenge the Turk at a game of chess. Impressively, the Turk was able not only to move its own chess pieces but also to recognize if its opponent made an illegal move and even to win a large portion of the games it played. The automaton was a sensation. Before being destroyed by a fire in New York in the 1850s, it toured throughout Europe and North America and played against such opponents as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. Most impressive, though, is the secret that the Turk managed to keep for over 50 years: it was all a fraud.
Mälzel continued with exhibitions around the United States until 1828, when he took some time off and visited Europe, returning in 1829. Throughout the 1830s, he continued to tour the United States, exhibiting the machine as far west as the Mississippi River and visiting Canada. In Richmond, Virginia, the Turk was observed by Edgar Allan Poe, who was writing for the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe's essay "Maelzel's Chess Player" was published in April 1836 and is the most famous essay on the Turk, even though many of Poe's hypotheses were incorrect (such as that a chess-playing machine must always win).[57]
Owing to the Turk's popularity and mystery, its construction inspired a number of inventions and imitations,[3] including Ajeeb, or "The Egyptian", an American imitation built by Charles Hopper that President Grover Cleveland played in 1885, and Mephisto, the self-described "most famous" machine, of which little is known.[75] The first imitation was made while Mälzel was in Baltimore. Created by the Brothers Walker, the "American Chess Player" made its debut in May 1827 in New York.[76] El Ajedrecista was built in 1912 by Leonardo Torres y Quevedo as a chess-playing automaton and made its public debut during the Paris World Fair of 1914. Capable of playing rook and king versus king endgames using electromagnets, it was the first true chess-playing automaton, and a precursor of sorts to Deep Blue.[77]
Even that incident, though, was not the first time the line between man and machine had been blurred in the game. The first machine to awe humanity with its chess mastery was the eighteenth-century life-size automaton known as the Turk. Constructed in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen to impress Empress Maria Theresa, the Turk appeared as a wooden Oriental sorcerer seated at a large cabinet. Before playing commenced, Kempelen would open the cabinet doors to reveal the clockwork machinery that controlled the Turk. The audience could see that there was nothing else inside. After the doors were closed and a challenger seated, the Turk would come eerily to life. He would move the pieces robotically, but shake his head or tap his hand in human displays of annoyance or pride. He also nearly always won. 2ff7e9595c
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