The Turk:
The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine
By Tom Standage
Walker, 272 pages, $24
`Chess,’ Pascal said, “is the gymnasium of the mind.” But for Enlightenment age tinkerer and Hungarian man of science Wolfgang von Kempelen, the game was the mother of invention. In his diverting chronicle of engineering genius, clever showmanship and P.T. Barnum-like trickery, Tom Standage, technology correspondent of The Economist, charts the long, strange career of the Turk, von Kempelen’s chess-playing mechanical man–or automaton–which intrigued, enraged and bedeviled an era. The contraption played a mean game of chess, frequently besting the masters of the day, not to mention Napoleon and Ben Franklin (both lost, and weren’t happy about it).
“The Turk” opens a fascinating window onto the emerging culture of technophilia, to the early days of mechanical engineering, the intricacies
of chess and the mania for mechanical toys (akin to our craze for cell phones and PalmPilots) that seized the European public’s imagination in the last years of the 18th Century and the early decades of the 19th. Truly, it was the era of the automaton: Standage regales his readers with bizarre instances of talking ducks made from metal and rubber tubing and mechanical elephants “encrusted with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and pearls.”
Standage makes some rather extravagant, if glib, claims for von Kempelen’s contraption, writing that it “would unwittingly help to inspire the development of the power loom, the telephone, the computer, and the detective story.” “Automata are the forgotten ancestors of almost all modern technology,” he writes. “From computers to compact-disc players, railway engines to robots, the origins of today’s machines can be traced back to the elaborate mechanical toys that flourished in the eighteenth century.”
And Standage’s narrative sometimes bogs down in the frightfully complex minutiae of the Turk’s operation and the theories mooted about its operation.
But these are quibbles. “The Turk” is a gem of a book. Von Kempelen’s creation made its debut in 1770 to the oohs and ahs of an astonished, somewhat incredulous audience in the court of Maria Theresa, empress of the Austrian Empire. She had invited von Kempelen, a senior civil servant, to explain the secrets behind a conjurer’s tricks. After viewing the show, von Kempelen, left cold by the magician’s repertoire and in a moment of hasty daring, told the empress he could do the conjurer one better. And that he did.
Von Kempelen was something of a self-taught genius, a Renaissance man versed in the emerging sciences of physics, hydraulics and mechanical engineering. He knew several languages and effortlessly translated the Hungarian civil code from Latin into German in a matter of days. He brought all his knowledge to bear on the construction of his automaton, which took six frenzied months of figuring, banging and building.
And on a spring day in 1770, von Kempelen wheeled out a wooden cabinet, behind which sat a male figure, carved of wood, dressed in Oriental garb (which was then all the sartorial rage). The inventor threw down a challenge: His machine would play anyone who dared. A count volunteered. Von Kempelen inserted a key into the cabinet and wound up a mechanism that he displayed to the audience before the game commenced.
A few suspenseful moments passed, and the Turk sprang to life, moving its pawn forward. The game had begun, and von Kempelen’s life was to be forever altered.
Could it be? Could this be a thinking machine with the ability to move all on its own? During a game, the Turk would nod its head three times when it placed its opponent’s king in check (later in its career, it would even utter “Echec,” French for “check,” when it moved in for the kill).
From the first, there were howls of derision and disbelief. Many weren’t able to conceive of such a machine, which Standage argues is the antecedent to IBM’s fearsome Deep Blue computer (Deep Blue may beat grandmasters, but it lacks the mischievous charm of von Kempelen’s mechanical marvel). But all the while, von Kempelen kept his counsel; he wasn’t about to reveal his secrets. The Turk’s creator imagined a short career for his little machine. In his mind, he had succeeded in his task.
Von Kempelen wanted to move on to other projects, so he mothballed his creation. But some years later, Emperor Joseph II (Maria Theresa’s son) persuaded von Kempelen to give it another whirl. The Russian grand duke was coming to town, and what better opportunity could there be to show off Viennese ingenuity? So in 1781, the Turk came back to life. The emperor then persuaded von Kempelen to take his invention to Paris, and then to London in 1783, where he caused quite a stir, beating top players (and wounding egos in the process) and baffling audiences.
A chorus of explainers–and a zealous cult of explanation–sprang up during the Turk’s whirlwind tour. Wherever the Turk would go, the skeptics were sure to follow. Von Kempelen’s bravura incensed more than a few, who thought the Turk’s antics merely fraudulent imposture. Take, for example, Philip Thicknesse, a wealthy Englishman who published a crotchety pamphlet debunking von Kempelen as a phony:
” ‘That an Automaton may be made to move its hand, its head, and its eyes, in certain and regular motions, is past all doubt; but that an AUTOMATON can be made to move the Chessmen properly, as a pugnacious player, in consequence of the preceding move of a stranger, who undertakes to play against it, is UTTERLY IMPOSSIBLE.'”
But others, Standage writes, saw the Turk as “a mechanical puzzle to be solved, rather than a fraud to be uncovered.” Foremost of these sympathetic solvers of the Turk’s mysteries was a young Englishman, Robert Willis, who laid out a theory of the Turk’s operation. Willis delighted in the seeming ingenuity of it all but also incisively pointed out a crucial angle: von Kempelen’s crafty showmanship. Willis surmised that a concealed human really operated the Turk, and that the gadgetry, with all its whirring and ticking, was a bluff. ” ‘The glaring contradiction between eager display on the one hand, and studied concealment on the other,'” he said, ” ‘can only be reconciled by considering the exhibition of the mechanism as a mere stratagem, calculated to distract the attention, and mislead the judgement, of the spectators.'”
Still others, among them computing pioneer Charles Babbage, found in the Turk inspiration for their own research in technology and machine intelligence.
Was it sleight of hand or engineering genius? Well, a bit of both, and Standage excels at keeping the reader in suspense as to what made the Turk tick (and this reviewer won’t spoil it). The Turk became somewhat of an albatross for von Kempelen; he was a proud man who wanted recognition for his other achievements, for example, a typewriter for the blind that he designed. He died in 1804, overshadowed in the end by the product of his whimsy.
And what of the Turk? Enter scheming inventor, automaton fanatic and chronic debtor Johann Maelzel, who bought the Turk from von Kempelen’s son. Maelzel exploited its fame to the hilt–he needed the money.
After Napoleon defeated Austria in 1809, Maelzel arranged an encounter–in which the conquering general cheated! A few years later, Maelzel entered into a complicated financial arrangement with Napoleon’s stepson, who bought and then in effect leased back the Turk to Maelzel, who toured Europe on and off for several years. Ever the spendthrift, he ran afoul of his creditors, and he spirited himself and the Turk to America, arriving in 1826. Touring cities up and down the Eastern Seaboard, Maelzel caused the usual stir: Chess players lined up and were defeated, debunkers tried to unlock the Turk’s mysteries; a young Edgar Allan Poe even tried his hand at explaining the inner workings of von Kempelen’s creation.
But it all ended sadly. Maelzel died broke in 1838, and the poor Turk perished in a museum fire in 1854..
