The Turk

Construction

A performance in 1769 by the French illusionist François Pelletier at the court of Empress Maria Theresa in Schönbrunn Palace prompted Wolfgang von Kempelen to promise to return to the Palace within a year with an invention that would surpass Pelletier's illusions.

The result was the Automaton Chess Player, later known as the Turk, which Kempelen brought to a working state within 1769 and completed in early 1770. The machine consisted of a life-sized model of a human head and torso, with a black beard and grey eyes, and dressed in Ottoman robes and a turban – "the traditional costume", according to the technology writer Tom Standage, "of an oriental sorcerer". Its left arm held a long Ottoman smoking pipe when at rest, while its right lay on a cabinet that was "three feet and a half long, two feet deep, and two and a half feet high". Placed on the top of the cabinet was a chessboard. The front of the cabinet consisted of three doors, an opening and a drawer, which could be opened to reveal a red and white ivory chess set.

The interior had complications designed to mislead observers. When opened on the left, the front doors of the cabinet exposed gears and cogs resembling clockwork. The section was designed so that if the back doors of the cabinet were open at the same time one could see through the machine. The other side of the cabinet did not house machinery; instead it contained a red cushion and some removable parts, as well as brass structures. This too was designed to provide a clear line of vision through the machine. Underneath the robes of the Ottoman model, two other doors were hidden. These also exposed clockwork machinery and provided a similarly unobstructed view through the machine. The design allowed the presenter of the machine to open every available door to the public, to maintain the illusion of a purely clockwork mechanism.

Neither the clockwork visible on the left side of the machine nor the drawer that housed the chess set extended fully to the rear of the cabinet; they instead went only one-third of the way. A sliding seat was also installed, allowing the operator inside to move from place to place and thus evade observation as the presenter opened various doors. The sliding of the seat caused dummy machinery to slide into its place to further conceal the person inside the cabinet.

The chessboard on the top of the cabinet was thin enough to allow magnetic attraction. Each chess piece had a small, strong magnet attached to its base, and when placed on the board it would attract a magnet attached to a string under its place on the board. This allowed the operator inside the machine to see which pieces moved where on the chessboard. The underside of the chessboard was marked with squares numbered 1 to 64, helping the operator to see which places on the board were affected by a player's move. The internal magnets were positioned so that outside magnetic forces would not influence them, and Kempelen would often allow a large magnet to sit at the side of the board in an attempt to show that the machine was not influenced by magnetism.

Exhibition

The Turk made its debut in 1770 at Schönbrunn Palace, about six months after Pelletier's act. Kempelen addressed the court, presenting what he had built, and began the demonstration of the machine and its parts. Kempelen began every showing of the Turk by opening the doors and drawers of the cabinet, allowing members of the audience to inspect the machine. He would then announce that the machine was ready for a challenger.

Kempelen insisted that the Turk would use the white pieces and have the first move (as the convention that White moves first was not yet established, these were not redundant to say). Between moves, the Turk kept its left arm on the cushion. It could nod twice if it threatened its opponent's queen and three times upon placing the king in check. If an opponent made an illegal move, the Turk would shake its head, move the piece back and make its own move, thus forcing a forfeit of its opponent's move. Louis Dutens, a traveller who observed a showing of the Turk, "attempted to practice a small deception, by giving the Queen the move of a Knight, but my mechanic opponent was not to be so imposed on; he took up my Queen and replaced her in the square she had been removed from". Kempelen made it a point to traverse the room during the match, and invited observers to bring magnets and iron bars to the cabinet to test whether the machine operated via a lodestone.

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".

Mälzel

Following the death of Kempelen, the Turk remained unexhibited until 1805, when Kempelen's son decided to sell it to Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, a Bavarian musician with an interest in machines and devices. Mälzel, whose successes included patenting a form of metronome, had tried to buy the Turk before Kempelen's death. That attempt failed, owing to Kempelen's asking price of 20,000 francs; his son sold the machine to Mälzel for half this sum. On acquiring the Turk, Mälzel learned how it worked and returned it to working order. His goal was to make explaining the Turk a greater challenge. The completion of this task took ten years, during which the Turk still made appearances, most notably with Napoleon Bonaparte.

In 1809, Napoleon I of France arrived at Schönbrunn Palace to play the Turk. The details of the encounter have been published over the years in numerous accounts, among which even those by Silas Mitchell and George Allen (see below) are contradictory (Allen's being the more plausible). According to Bradley Ewart, it is believed that the Turk sat at its cabinet, and Napoleon sat at a separate chess table. Napoleon's table was in a roped-off area and he was not allowed to cross into the Turk's area, with Mälzel crossing back and forth to make each player's move and allowing a clear view for the spectators. According to a brief eyewitness report, the Turk made a gesture with his hand to Napoleon before the start of the match. In a surprise move, Napoleon took the first turn instead of allowing the Turk to make the first move, as was usual; but Mälzel allowed the game to continue. Shortly thereafter, Napoleon attempted an illegal move. The Turk returned the piece to its original place and continued the game. Napoleon attempted the illegal move a second time, and the Turk responded by removing the piece from the board entirely and taking its turn. Napoleon then attempted the move a third time, the Turk responding with a sweep of its arm, knocking all the pieces off the board. This reportedly amused Napoleon, who then played a real game with the machine, completing nineteen moves before tipping over his king in surrender. Alternative versions of the story include playing the machine at a later time, playing one game with a magnet on the board, or playing a game with a shawl around the head and body of the Turk in an attempt to obscure its vision – all of them probably apocryphal, in contrast to the stories that he was a bad loser and often indulgently allowed to win by stronger opponents.

In 1811, Mälzel brought the Turk to Milan for a performance with Eugène de Beauharnais, Prince of Venice and Viceroy of Italy. Beauharnais enjoyed the machine so much that he offered to buy it from Mälzel. After some protracted bargaining, Beauharnais acquired the Turk for 30,000 francs – three times what Mälzel had paid – and kept it for four years. In 1815, Mälzel returned to Beauharnais in Munich and asked to buy back the Turk. There are differing accounts of the conditions of the sale.

North American tour

The appearances of the Turk were profitable for Mälzel, and he continued by taking it and his other machines to the United States. In 1826, he opened an exhibition in New York (in the National Hotel, on 112 Broadway) that was very popular, averaging a hundred people in April, while in May "the hall was filled, and sometimes two hundred were turned away for lack of seats". It prompted many newspaper articles and anonymous threats of exposure of the hoax. Mälzel's problem was finding a talented operator for the machine, having trained an unknown woman in France before touring the United States. The "subsistence" in Paris of a former operator from Alsace, William Schlumberger "was both scanty and precarious"; and Mälzel induced him to come to Boston. As the Turk's main operator in the new world, Schlumberger "considered himself to have been fairly and kindly treated by Maelzel, and remained faithfully attached to his person and his interests to the last".

Upon Schlumberger's arrival, the Turk debuted in Boston, in the Julien Hall. Mälzel claimed that "the players of Boston are at least equal to those of New York" and promised that in Boston the Turk would offer to play not only endgames but also full games. The Turk was exhibited in Boston for several weeks, and the tour moved to Philadelphia for nearly three months, during which period it "lost a full game over the course of two exhibitions to a 'Mrs. Fisher', described in the front-page Baltimore Gazette headline as a 'Lady' of the city". Following Philadelphia, the Turk moved to Baltimore, where it played for several months, losing a game against the 89-year-old Charles Carroll, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence.

Mälzel continued with exhibitions around the United States until 1828, when he took some time off and visited Europe, returning in 1829. Throughout the 1830s, he continued to tour the United States. In Richmond, Virginia, the Turk was observed by Edgar Allan Poe, writing for the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe's "Maelzel's chess-player", published in April 1836 (and owing much to a book by David Brewster published in 1832), is the most famous essay on the Turk, even though many of its hypotheses were incorrect: little or nothing else written on the same subject can "approach [its] literary brilliance". By this time, frequent exhibition of the Turk and publication of numerous descriptions, however mistaken, of its workings and human agency, had reduced interest in it. The star attraction among Mälzel's exhibits was now the highly dramatic "Conflagration of Moscow". Mälzel travelled farther in 1836–37 – to Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, and New Orleans in the United States; and to Havana – and back to Philadelphia, where he spent more time preparing his Moscow diorama.

Later years

On the return of the ship on which Mälzel had died, his various machines, including the Turk, fell into the hands of the businessman John Ohl, a friend of his. Ohl attempted to auction off the Turk; but, owing to low bidding, ultimately bought it himself for $400 (equivalent to $12,000 in 2025), and less than half the winning bid for the "Panorama of Moscow", as an investment. Only when John Kearsley Mitchell – from Philadelphia, Edgar Allan Poe's personal physician, long deeply curious about the Turk – approached Ohl did the Turk change hands again. However, what Mitchell received turned out to be incomplete:

The five crates were found to contain pieces of Maelzel's other automata ... mixed in with the components of the Turk, several pieces of which were also missing and had to be retrieved from other boxes in Ohl's warehouse at Lombard Street Wharf. The Turk had lost its clothes, legs, pipe, and part of its head; a list drawn up by Mitchell of "things to be found and looked for" also included the cabinet doors, castors, and chessmen.

Mitchell formed a club to restore the Turk for public appearances, completing the work in 1840.

As interest in the Turk continued, Mitchell and his club deposited it to the Philadelphia Museum (founded by Charles Willson Peale), the ground floor of whose building – "at Ninth and George (now Sansom) Streets" – had since its opening in December 1838 been occupied by Nathan Dunn's Chinese Museum.

Although the Turk still occasionally gave performances – and for that on 4 December 1840 it was advertised as "[having] been seen by more eyes than any terrestrial object ever exhibited" – these were devoid of professional showmanship and had little appeal. It was eventually relegated to a back corner of the museum and forgotten.

Dunn's entire Chinese collection left Philadelphia for good in December 1841; but the Chinese Museum remained "the popular, but not accurate, name given to the whole building". As for the Philadelphia Museum, Edmund Peale (a grandson of the founder) bought the collection in 1845; he then quickly moved it into "the former Masonic Hall in Chestnut Street above Seventh ... All was ready by January 1846." The Chinese Museum building on George Street became the place where "[all Philadelphia society's] great public meetings came to be held as a matter of course".

Publication of the mechanism

According to James Cook, by the mid-1820s "hundreds, if not thousands, of 'approaches' had been made toward discovering the secret [of the mechanical Turk], many of which were actually very close to the answer". The young Robert Willis (later a mechanical engineer and architectural historian) carefully observed Mälzel's exhibitions of the Turk, and in an 1821 booklet summarily dismissed some earlier theories: "[I]t has been suggested that [Mälzel] might touch certain springs, or pull 'a wire not much thicker than a hair', or be furnished with a powerful magnet. But such conjectures are unworthy of serious refutation". Willis noted anomalies such as the lack of correlation between the degree to which the clockwork was wound up and the number of moves the Turk then executed. He showed how "any person, well skilled in the game, and not exceeding the ordinary bulk or stature, may secretly animate the Automaton" – even if with some inaccuracies, notably that "[the operator's] head being above the table, he will see the chess-board through the waistcoat, as easily as through a veil".

In 1826, the Massachusetts physician Gamaliel Bradford published a booklet, The History and Analysis of the Supposed Automaton Chess Player of M. de Kempelen, in which he considered a number of ways in which the Turk might be directed by Mälzel or another person outside it or by an operator within it. Even if not an automaton, concluded Bradford, "it must be admitted to be one of the most ingenious, & completely successful contrivances, which has ever been offered to the public".

The hoax was exposed in 1827 during a match in Baltimore when the unusually high temperature rendered the operator, William Schlumberger, faint. He signalled to Mälzel to stop the game; but before Mälzel could act on this, Schlumberger, in desperation, escaped from the cabinet of the Turk. That he did so was not entirely clear to the audience; however, two teens enjoying a free view of the performance from a nearby rooftop saw and understood what had happened. One told his father, who told the Baltimore Gazette, which published an article on its front page saying that "This ingenious contrivance ... has at length been discovered by accident to be merely the case in which a human agent has always been concealed, when exhibited to an audience." Although Mälzel withdrew the Turk from his travelling show (which continued with "The Conflagration of Moscow" and "The Trumpeter"), the Gazette story had little impact, with George Allen writing:

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.

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.

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.