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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mechanical Turk | 7/8 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:30:38.944310+00:00 | kb-cron |
[N]obody credited the pretended discovery. The world had set its heart upon believing that the secret, which had puzzled mechanicians, mathematicians, and monarchs, for more than half a century, was something quite too deep to be penetrated by a couple of boys. The National Intelligencer, of Washington ... sagaciously treated the Gazette article as having emanated from Maelzel himself – "the tale of a discovery was but a clever device of the proprietor to keep alive the interest of the community in his exhibition". Lesser newspapers, suggests Allen, were too timid to contradict the prestigious Intelligencer and Mälzel's business was little impacted. Of the many contemporary books and articles written about the mechanism of the Turk, most were inaccurate and drew incorrect inferences. An exception was "Automate joueur d'échecs", published in the popular magazine Le Magasin pittoresque in 1834, and widely believed to have been informed, or perhaps even written, by one of the Turk's operators, Jacques Mouret. In 1836, Mathieu de Tournay based a more detailed description of the Turk for the chess magazine Le Palamède on the Magasin pittoresque article. It was not until Silas Mitchell's article for The Chess Monthly in 1857 that the secret was fully revealed. Mitchell, son of the final private owner of the Turk, wrote that "perhaps no secret was ever kept as the Turk's has been. Guessed at, in part, many times, no one of the several explanations in our possession has ever practically solved this amusing puzzle". As the Turk had been lost to fire, Mitchell felt that there were "no longer any reasons for concealing from the amateurs of chess, the solution of this ancient enigma". A biographical history about the Chess-player and Mälzel was also presented in Willard Fiske's The Book of the First American Chess Congress (1859). The account, "The Automaton Chess-Player in America", was written by the academic George Allen in the form of a letter to William Lewis, a former operator of the Turk. In 1859, a letter published in the Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch by William F. Kummer, who worked as an operator under John Mitchell, revealed how a candle inside the cabinet had provided light for the operator. A series of tubes led from the lamp to the turban of the Turk for ventilation. Smoke rising from the turban would be disguised by that from the other candelabra where the game was played. The American Chess Magazine published an account in 1889 of the Turk's match with Napoleon. The story was basically a review of previous accounts, and a substantive account only came in 1947, when Chess Review published a two-part article by Kenneth Harkness and Jack Straley Battell that provided a full history and description of the Turk, complete with new diagrams that synthesized information from previous publications. An article written in 1960 for American Heritage by Ernest Wittenberg provided new diagrams describing how the operator sat inside the cabinet. Not all the 20th-century accounts were advances. Henry A. Davidson's 1945 book A Short History of Chess takes seriously Poe's erroneous notion that the player sat inside the Turk figure. In his The Machine Plays Chess? (1978), Alex G. Bell opts for "a mind-reading act". Charles Michael Carroll's The Great Chess Automaton (1975) focuses more on the studies of the Turk. Bradley Ewart's Chess: Man vs. Machine (1980) discusses the Turk as well as other purported chess-playing automata. It was not until the creation of Deep Blue, IBM's computer that in 1997 defeated the world (human) champion, that interest increased again, and two more books devoted to the Turk were published: Gerald Levitt's The Turk, Chess Automaton and Tom Standage's The Turk.
== Legacy ==
The Turk's popularity and mystery inspired a number of inventions and imitations. The first appeared while Mälzel was in Baltimore. Created by two brothers named Walker, the "American Chess Player" made its debut in May 1827 in New York. Mälzel viewed the machine and attempted to buy it, but his offer of a 15-game match between the two machines for a stake of $3,000 was declined, as was his offer to buy the machine. The American Chess Player toured for a number of years but never received the fame that Mälzel's machine did and eventually fell into obscurity. Others included Ajeeb, or "The Egyptian", an American imitation built by Charles Hopper that President Grover Cleveland played in 1885; and Mephisto, advertised as the "most famous" machine, of which little is known. In 1784 the Turk was visited in London by the prebendary Edmund Cartwright, who was so intrigued that he questioned whether it would be more difficult to construct a power loom than a device that would play chess. Cartwright would patent the prototype for a power loom within the year. Genuine chess-playing automata did not emerge until 1912, when El Ajedrecista was built by Leonardo Torres Quevedo. It was exhibited at the new laboratory of Mécanique physique et expérimentale of the University of Paris, on boulevard Raspail, and used electromagnets to win rook and king versus king endgames.