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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mechanical Turk | 3/8 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:30:38.944310+00:00 | kb-cron |
The first person to play against the Turk was Ludwig von Cobenzl, an Austrian courtier at the palace. Along with other challengers that day, he was quickly defeated, with observers of the match stating that the machine played aggressively and typically beat its opponents within thirty minutes. Another part of the machine's exhibition was the completion of the knight's tour, a famed puzzle requiring the player to move a knight around a chessboard, visiting each square once along the way. While most experienced chess players of the time still struggled with this, the Turk could complete the tour without any difficulty from any starting point thanks to a pegboard marked with a closed-loop solution (a "reentrant tour"). Furthermore, the Turk could converse with spectators using a letterboard. The operator during the period when Kempelen presented the machine at Schönbrunn Palace, whose identity is unknown, was able to do this in English, French and German. Carl Friedrich Hindenburg, a mathematician, kept a record of the conversations during the Turk's time in Leipzig and published it in 1784. Topics of questions put to and answered by the Turk included its age, marital status and secret workings.
== European tour == Following word of its debut, interest in the machine grew across Europe. However, Kempelen avoided exhibiting the Turk, often lying about its repair status to prospective challengers. Von Windisch wrote that Kempelen "refused to gratify his friends, and many curious people of different countries, who wished to see this boasted machine, under a pretence that it had received damage by being removed from place to place". In the decade following its debut at Schönbrunn Palace, the Turk only played one opponent, Robert Murray Keith, a Scottish diplomat, and Kempelen went as far as dismantling the Turk entirely following the pair of games. He was quoted dismissing the invention as a mere trifle, as he was not pleased with its popularity and preferred to continue work on machines that replicated human speech. In 1781, Kempelen was ordered by Emperor Joseph II to reconstruct the Turk and deliver it to Vienna for a state visit from Grand Duke Paul of Russia and his wife. The appearance was so successful that the Grand Duke suggested a tour of Europe for the Turk, a request to which Kempelen reluctantly agreed.
The Turk began its European tour in April 1783, in France. A stop at Versailles beginning on 17 April preceded an exhibition in Paris, where it lost a match to the Duke of Bouillon. Upon arrival in Paris in May, it was displayed to the public and played a variety of opponents, including a lawyer named Mr Bernard, one of five French players regarded as of second rank. Demands increased for a match with François-André Danican Philidor, who with Legall de Kermeur was considered the best chess player of his time. Moving to the Café de la Régence, the machine played many of the most skilled players, often losing (e.g. against Bernard and Verdoni), until securing a match with Philidor at the Académie des Sciences. While Philidor won his match with the Turk, Philidor's son noted that his father called it "his most fatiguing game of chess ever". The Turk's final game in Paris was against Benjamin Franklin, then the American ambassador to France. Franklin reportedly enjoyed the game with the Turk and remained interested in the machine for the rest of his life, keeping a copy of Philip Thicknesse's book The Speaking Figure and the Automaton Chess Player, Exposed and Detected in his personal library. Following his tour of Paris, Kempelen moved the Turk to London, where it was exhibited daily for five shillings. Thicknesse was a sceptic and sought out the Turk in an attempt to expose its inner workings. While he respected Kempelen as "a very ingenious man", he asserted that the Turk was an elaborate hoax with a small child inside the machine, describing the machine as "a complicated piece of clockwork ... which is nothing more, than one, of many other ingenious devices, to misguide and delude the observers". In a popular book first published in 1784, and largely devoted to the tricks of Joseph Pinetti, Henri Decremps has "Van Estin" (a fictionalized version of Kempelen) attribute the operation of "an automaton chess player, similar to the one shewn at Paris and Vienna, by a German mechanick" to "a dwarf, a famous chess player, who was hidden in the commode". After a year in London, Kempelen and the Turk travelled to Leipzig, stopping in various European cities along the way. From Leipzig, they went to Dresden, where Joseph Friedrich Freiherr von Racknitz viewed the machine and published his findings with illustrations showing how he believed it operated. They then moved to Amsterdam, after which Kempelen is said to have accepted an invitation to the Sanssouci palace in Potsdam. Frederick is said to have enjoyed the Turk so much that he paid a large sum to Kempelen in exchange for its secrets. Frederick never divulged these but was reportedly disappointed to learn how the machine worked. However, this story is apocryphal: there is no evidence of the Turk's encounter with Frederick, the first mention of which comes in the early 19th century, by which time the Turk was incorrectly said to have played against George III of Great Britain. It seems most likely that the machine stayed dormant at Schönbrunn Palace for over two decades, although Kempelen attempted unsuccessfully to sell it in the final years before his death at 70 on 26 March 1804.