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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mechanical Turk | 8/8 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:30:38.944310+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== In literature and the arts === The Turk has inspired works of various kinds of fiction. An early example is Jean Paul's story Menschen sind Maschinen der Engel, written in 1785. Its narrator starts by saying that we humans are merely the furniture of the true inhabitants of the world, angels; and it is "obvious [that] our industriousness, which works against our happiness, is conducive to other beings' happiness, whose hands conduct ours as their tools". Chess-playing machines exemplify the building by machines (that is, people) of machines; of which the narrator's description culminates in a "deliberate confusion of chess-playing humans and chess-playing machines", leaving the reader "incessantly bewildered about the status of the story's actors (as well as the reader's own status) as machine or as human". Fiction has also been passed off as fact. In 1859 an article in Littell's Living Age purported to be an account of the Turk from the celebrated French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin; its content soon reappeared in Robert-Houdin's memoir. Its many errors ranged from mistaken dates to outright inventions, most conspicuously the story of "an officer by the name of Worousky" whose legs had been amputated after battle, but who was rescued by Kempelen and smuggled back to Russia inside the machine. Standage sums it up: "Robert-Houdin's entire account must be dismissed as fiction." Paul Metzner remarks that "This story, contained in [Robert-Houdin's] very popular autobiography, seems to have revived interest in the Turk." The fiction was subsequently repeated as fact, notably in Encyclopædia Britannica: the 11th edition, and in other editions as well. This tale of concealing a Pole named Worousky within the Turk "had the legs its protagonist lacked". Sheryl N. Hamilton mentions "dramatic plays, at least three novels, and even a silent film" deriving from this fantasy of Robert-Houdin's. One such novel is Sheila E. Braine's The Turkish Automaton (1898). Another is Henry Dupuy-Mazuel's Le Joueur d'échecs (1926), published in English translation as both The Chess Player and The Devil Is an Empress. Plays include Jules Adenis and Octave Gastineau's La Czarine, first performed in 1868. The silent film deriving from Robert-Houdin's fictional version via Dupuy-Mazuel's is Raymond Bernard's feature The Chess Player (Le Joueur d'échecs, 1927), in which a young Polish nationalist on the run from the occupying Russians is hidden inside a chess-playing automaton. There have also been derivatives independent of Robert-Houdin. Ambrose Bierce's 1899 short story "Moxon's Master" is a morbid tale about a chess-playing automaton that resembles the Turk, as described by Poe. Gene Wolfe's 1977 science fiction short story "The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton" is about a device very similar to the Turk. Robert Löhr's 2007 novel The Chess Machine (published in the UK as The Secrets of the Chess Machine) focuses on the man inside the machine, a dwarf named Tibor. In the first of his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin likened strict Marxist historiography to the Mechanical Turk: "one can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called 'historical materialism' is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight." Jane Irwin's webcomic and later graphic novel Clockwork Game: The Illustrious Career of a Chess-Playing Automaton is based on the Turk. A film inspired by the Turk is Tod Browning's White Tiger (1923). Its three main characters, who find themselves partners in crime, include one who is both a "double-crossing hood" and a "genius at chess". Essential to the trio's scheme to make a killing is "the chess-playing Turk", whose cabinet serves to conceal either its operator or a burglar. There have been at least two television films based on the Turk. A 13-episode French–Italian–Austrian–Hungarian series, Les Évasions célèbres (Famous Escapes) was broadcast in France on ORTF in 1972 as well as elsewhere (e.g. East Germany in 1977). One 55-minute episode, Le Joueur d'échecs (Der Schachspieler), directed by Christian-Jaque, has Napoleon (Robert Manuel) encounter the automaton in Kempelen's castle, play against it, and lose. El jugador de ajedrez or Le Joueur d'échecs de Maelzel, a 54-minute television film produced in Mexico and France and directed by Juan Luis Buñuel, was first broadcast in 1981 as one of a series of films based on Poe. A chess-playing computer named "the Turk" is a plot device in the television series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
=== Reconstructions ===
From 1984 to 1989, John Gaughan, an American manufacturer of equipment for magicians based in Los Angeles, spent $120,000 (equivalent to $370,000 in 2025) building his own version of Kempelen's machine. The machine uses the original chessboard, which had been stored separately and was not destroyed in the fire. The first public display of Gaughan's Turk was in November 1989 at the Los Angeles Conference on Magic History. The machine was presented much as Kempelen had presented the original, except that its opponent was a computer running a chess program. At Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum, an information technology museum in Paderborn, Germany, researchers and engineers under Bernhard Fromme spent just over a year creating another replica, unveiling it in 2004; it has continued to be exhibited there since.
== Notes ==
== References ==
== Sources ==
== Further reading ==
== External links ==
Mechanical Turk player profile and games at Chessgames.com Dunning, Brian (21 July 2015). "Skeptoid #476: The Chess-Playing Mechanical Turk". Skeptoid. Irwin, Jane (2008–2013). Clockwork Game: The Illustrious Career of a Chess-Playing Automaton. Webcomic with annotations. As a codex: Irwin, Jane (2013). Clockwork Game: The Illustrious Career of a Chess-Playing Automaton. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Fiery Studios. ISBN 978-0-9743110-2-9 – via Internet Archive.