In 1769, a French magician named François Pelletier performed illusions before Empress Maria Theresa at Schönbrunn Palace. A court councillor in the audience was unimpressed. Wolfgang von Kempelen, an inventor and royal advisor, told the empress he could build something far more spectacular. About six months later, in 1770, he kept his word — and unveiled a machine that would fool the world for 84 years.
The "Turk" was a life-size wooden mannequin dressed in Ottoman robes and a turban, seated behind a cabinet about three and a half feet long. A chessboard sat on top. To prove nothing was hidden inside, Kempelen opened every door and drawer, lit a candle behind the clockwork, and even invited spectators to press magnets against the case. Then he wound a crank, and the figure reached out and moved a pawn.
It lost almost never.
The greatest trick ever shown
We now know exactly how it worked. The cabinet's innards were crammed with gears and cogs — real, but largely for show. Beneath them was a concealed compartment that slid sideways, letting a chess master shift out of the way as each door opened. The board was thin enough for magnetism: each piece had a magnet in its base, and a matching magnet on a string under the board told the hidden operator, square by numbered square, what the opponent had just done. A lever system moved the Turk's arm. It could even nod twice to say "your queen hangs," shake its head at an illegal move, and perform the knight's tour puzzle.
Over the decades the Turk defeated most challengers, including some of the era's most famous men. In Paris in 1783 it faced Benjamin Franklin, then America's ambassador to France. In 1809 it played Napoleon at Schönbrunn — when the emperor tried an illegal move twice, the Turk simply swept his arm across the board and knocked all the pieces off.
The one man who beat it was François-André Danican Philidor, the world's best player, who called the game the most fatiguing of his life.
The showman takes over
Kempelen grew bored with chess and retired the machine for a decade. Only in 1783, under pressure from Emperor Joseph II and a request from Russia's Grand Duke Paul, did he take it on a two-year tour of Europe. After Kempelen died in 1804, his son sold the Turk to Johann Nepomuk Mälzel — the Bavarian inventor best known for patenting the metronome — for roughly half the 20,000 francs Kempelen had once asked. Mälzel spent a decade restoring it, then toured Europe and the United States, to Cuba, and back.
Not everyone bought the act. Edgar Allan Poe saw the Turk and, in an 1836 essay for the Southern Literary Messenger, argued no "pure machine" could lose that often or play with such erratic timing. He was right, but he couldn't prove it. When Mälzel died at sea in 1838, the machine passed to John Kearsley Mitchell — Poe's own physician.
Fire, then the truth
After Mitchell's death, the Turk sat forgotten in a corner of the Peale Museum in Philadelphia until July 5, 1854, when a fire that started at the National Theater spread and destroyed it. Mitchell's son Silas, watching the flames, swore he heard the Turk whisper, "Échec! Échec!" — check, check.
The secret finally came out in 1857, when Silas Mitchell published the full mechanism in The Chess Monthly. The world, by then, suspected as much — but the Turk had earned its legend.
A name that lives on
Amazon named its 2005 crowdsourcing platform "Mechanical Turk" precisely because of the irony: humans hidden behind a machine doing work that computers can't. It's a fitting tribute to the con that showed, two centuries before Deep Blue was a whisper, just how badly we want to believe in a machine that plays chess. Today, if someone offers to show you a chess-playing robot, check underneath the table.
Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica/Wikipedia (Mechanical Turk); WIRED ("Monster in a Box"); History.com; HNF Paderborn; National Park Service (Allegheny Portage); Poe Society of Baltimore; TechCrunch; History of Information. All dates and names above drawn from these.