In 1769, at Schönbrunn Palace, the French illusionist François Pelletier finished a performance for Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. Wolfgang von Kempelen, a Hungarian inventor and royal advisor in the audience, was unimpressed. He told the court he could build something that would outdo any trick they had ever seen — and promised to return within the year.
He kept that promise.
Six months later Kempelen wheeled out a life-size wooden figure in Turkish robes and a turban, seated behind a cabinet the size of a lectern. He opened every door and drawer, lit candles to show the clockwork inside, then wound a crank. The figure turned its head, reached across the board with its right arm, and played its first move. The "Turk" had arrived — and it beat everyone put in front of it.
Here's the part that should alarm you: there was no machine. Not really.
Inside that cramped cabinet sat a human chess master, hunched in a compartment the audience's eyes never reached. A sliding seat let the operator dodge out of view as each door swung open. The pieces the audience saw carried magnets in their bases; below the board, a system of levers and a hanging magnet follower told the hidden player where they were, and let the Turk's arm lift and set pieces on their behalf. Every gear and crank the crowd admired was a working prop — real-looking, beautifully made, and useless.
The illusion ran for 84 years. It convinced the best minds of a century, because people wanted to believe. Napoleon I himself played the Turk at Schönbrunn in 1809; legend says he tried an illegal move, the Turk put the piece back, and when the emperor tried again, the machine swept every piece off the board. Napoleon laughed and played on. Benjamin Franklin also sat across from it in Paris, when he was American ambassador to France. He remained fascinated with the machine for the rest of his life.
Kempelen, tired of his creation, retired the Turk and died in 1804. It found a true showman in Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, a Bavarian musician who had invented an early form of metronome. Mälzel bought the automaton, added a speaking box so it could cry "Échec!" when it threatened the enemy king, and in 1826 took it to the United States. In Richmond, Virginia, a young Edgar Allan Poe watched it play and wrote an essay arguing that no machine moved that way — an act directed by a mind, he said. He was right, though he never quite cracked how.
Mälzel died at sea in 1838. By 1840 the Turk had been bought by a group of Philadelphia gentlemen headed by Dr. John Kearsley Mitchell, who had it restored and eventually placed in the Chinese Museum at Ninth and Sansom Streets. There, retired and largely forgotten, it gathered dust for years. Its last operator, during the American tour, had been William Schlumberger, who passed himself off as Mälzel's secretary between games.
The end came on the night of July 5, 1854. A fire broke out at the National Theatre, swept across the alley, and reached the museum. Mitchell's son, the physician and novelist Silas Weir Mitchell, rushed to the building — too late to get inside. Standing before the flames, he later wrote, he thought he heard, through the roar and the crackle of burning wood, the automaton's old cry, repeated one last time: "Échec! Échec!"
The secret outlived the Turk. In 1857 Silas published the first full account of its workings, and the last mystery dissolved.
Eighty-four years, kings and emperors fooled, and all of it hiding the most honest thing in chess: a human being, doing the thinking.
Sources: the kempelen.hu archive and the Yale University Press and Linda Hall Library notes on Kempelen and Mälzel; Wikipedia's "Mechanical Turk"; History.com's account of the automaton; and the Jefferson University magazine essay on the Mitchells, which quotes Silas Weir Mitchell's original obituary of the machine. The illusion ran for 84 years. It convinced the best minds of a century, because people wanted to believe. Napoleon I himself played the Turk at Schönbrunn in 1809; legend says he tried an illegal move, the Turk put the piece back, and when the emperor tried again, the machine swept every piece off the board. Napoleon laughed and played on. Benjamin Franklin played it too, during his years as American ambassador to France, and stayed fascinated with the machine for the rest of his life. The end came on the night of July 5, 1854. Fire broke out at the National Theatre, swept across the alley, and reached the museum. Mitchell's son, the physician and novelist Silas Weir Mitchell, rushed to the building — too late to get inside. Standing before the flames, he later wrote, he thought he heard, through the roar and the crackle of burning wood, the automaton's old cry, repeated one last time: "Échec! Échec!" Mälzel died at sea in 1838. By 1840 the Turk had been bought by a group of Philadelphia gentlemen headed by Dr. John Kearsley Mitchell, who had it restored and placed in the Chinese Museum at Ninth and Sansom Streets. There, retired and largely forgotten, it gathered dust for years. Its last operator, during the American tour, had been William Schlumberger, who passed himself off as Mälzel's secretary between games.