Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Mechanical Turk

Episode Date: November 28, 2021

You’ve probably heard of artificial intelligence systems which have gotten so good that they can beat the best humans at Go, chess, and even Jeopardy. However, over 200 years ago one Hungarian engineer created a mechanical device that could defeat the world’s greatest chess players. Sort of. Learn more about The Mechanical Turk and how it convinced people for over 80 years that it could play chess, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You've probably heard of artificial intelligence systems, which have gotten so good that they can beat the best humans at games like Go, chess, or even Jeopardy. However, 200 years ago, one Hungarian engineer created a mechanical device that could defeat the world's greatest chess players. Sort of. Learn more about the mechanical Turk and how it convinced people for over 80 years that it could play chess on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep, only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nicolai created Nothing Much Happens.

Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing.

You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. Way back in the day, Royal Courts were very important places. You didn't have easy communication, so many nobles and members of the aristocracy would spend extended amounts of time at the palace. Here they would consult, gossip, scheme, and flatter the monarch. And they would also get really bored. Entertainment was a high priority at any European royal court.

For example, as a child, Wolfgang Mozart and his family traveled around Europe, entertaining all the royal courts. In addition to music, there might be balls, banquets, poets, actors, storytellers, and magicians. It was in this environment that a Hungarian engineer by the name of Wolfgang von Kempelan attended a session of court by the Empress Maria Teresa of Austria at Schoen-Palice in 1769. During the session was a performance by a French illusionist by the name of Francois Peltier. Peltier's act basically consisted of performing allusions with magnets, whose properties were still relatively unknown in the mid-18th century.

Kemplin was witness to this act, and the reaction it got from the royal court in attendance. After the performance, Kempelin announced to those in attendance that he would create something which would top Francois Peltier's performance. For six months, he worked on the project in secret. In 1770, he introduced his creation to the Empress and everyone at court, and they were blown away. What Kempelin unveiled was really different. To start with, it was a wooden mannequin with just the head torso in arms.

It was dressed in a traditional Turkish garb, including robes, a turban, and a long clay pipe in his left hand. The mannequin was positioned behind a waist-high cabinet. On top of the cabinet was a chessboard. In front was a drawer at the bottom which held the chess pieces, and two doors that revealed the complex inner workings of his machine. Inside was a very complicated assortment of gears, cogs, levers, and switches. There were also doors in the back of the cabinet that opened such that an observer could see right through the entire device upon inspection. There were also doors at the back of the mannequin, and everything could be open for people to see.

What the machine would do is play chess. He called it the automaton chess player. To begin his performance, he would open up all the doors to the cabinet and show the audience what was inside. He would then announce that because of the nature of the device, it had to play white and go first. The first player ever was Count Ludwig von Kobenzel, and he was beaten easily. The machine took on other opponents and defeated them all. Kempelin was not controlling the device.

He would walk around the room giving commentary and asking the audience to bring magnets and iron to the cabinet to prove that it was not done through magnetism. The mannequin was also set up to nod twice if it had its opponent in check and three times if in checkmate. It could also shake its head if the opponent made an illegal move. And the pieces were moved by the left hand of the mannequin. There was also a letterboard next to the chess board which allowed the machine to answer simple questions. The machine was dubbed the mechanical Turk, or just the Turk, based on its dress. It was a smash hit at the Austrian court and far surpassed its goal of upstaging Peltier's illusions. Automatons themselves were nothing new.

There were many of them that were built, but they all did very simple things. and you can still see many of these devices in clock towers all around Europe. This, however, was something totally different. This automaton seemed like it could think. It instigated many debates at court as to how it worked. Some people thought that it must have been magnets. Some thought that it was controlled by supernatural powers. Some thought a child or a dwarf was inside the cabinet.

And others thought that it was actually an intelligent machine. The device appeared at court in Vienna for four years until it was retired in 1774. Kempelan's interest had moved on to other things, including creating a box to recreate human speech. In the years that followed, only one person ever played the Turk, Sir Robert Murray Keith of Scotland. After that, he completely dismantled the device. After Empress Maria Teresa died in 1780, her successor, Joseph II, encouraged Kemplin to rebuild the Turk and to take it on tour to the Royal Courts of Europe. He rebuilt the machine and started the tour in 1783, with the first stop being the court of Versailles. It was a hit with the French

court, and then it was put on public display. demands for the Turk to play the greatest French chess player of that time, Francois André Philidor. Eventually, the match with Philidor was arranged. The Turk lost, but Philidor's son said it was the most tiring game he ever played. The last game the Turk played in Paris was against Benjamin Franklin, who was the American envoy to France at the time. Franklin lost the game and remained fascinated with it for the rest of his life. From there, the tour went to London and then traveled through Germany, visiting Leipzig, Dresden, and Berlin. Eventually, the machine in Kempelin returned Vienna where it sat, mostly unused until Kempelin's death in 1804. In 1805, the Turk

came into the hands of Johann Meitzel, a musician from Bavaria. He tried to buy it from Kempelan when he was alive, but he wanted too much money. He managed to get it from his son for only half the price. Once he had access to the machine, he was able to figure out its secrets, and made it work for himself. Famously, in 1809, after the conquest of Vienna, Napoleon Bonaparte played the mechanical Turk at Schoenbren Palace. Instead of letting the Turk go first, as usual, Napoleon went first. Despite violating the rules, Maisel allowed the game to continue. Then, Napoleon tried to cheat. The Turk returned the piece to its original square. Then Napoleon tried to cheat again. And again, the Turk returned the piece.

When Napoleon tried to cheat a third time, it swiped its hand across the board, knocking all the pieces on the floor. In 1811, Maisel took the Turk to Italy to perform for the viceroy of Italy, who enjoyed it so much that he offered him three times what Maisel originally paid. He sold it, but then bought it back four years later. He continued touring with the Mechanical Turk, taking it on public performances in France and London, chalking up lopsided records wherever he went, and raking in money from the audiences. He slowly added more elements to the performance to keep it interesting. In 1826, he took the Turk to the United States.

He began by conducting performances in New York and Boston. The crowds were larger and more profitable than they ever were before. For years, he traveled with the machine throughout the United States and Canada, as far as St. Louis. Iger Allen Poe even wrote a poem titled, Maisel's chess player. Eventually, Maisel died in 1838 in route to Europe trying to return home. The Turk eventually changed hand several times before winding up in a Philadelphia museum where it was destroyed in a fire in 1854. The Mechanical Turk stunned audiences for almost 84 years. During that time, many people had theories as to how it worked. Most of them had it completely

wrong, and only a few people actually figured out how it really worked. It wasn't until 1857 when the son of the last owner revealed the secret in an article written in The Chess Monthly. The secret to the trick is exactly what you probably think it was. There was a person inside the cabinet. All of the gears and cogs inside the cabinet were just a distraction. The drawer in the bottom only slid out about a third of the way. The person inside the cabinet was on a sliding seat. When the doors were opened, the seat would slide and components would move into place to show that there was something there. The chess board was very thin, and there were magnets below the board to show where the moves were being made. The Turk mannequin itself was controlled by levers

inside the cabinet. The people inside the cabinet were not children or dwarves. They changed over the years, but they were usually expert chess players. For example, Johann Baptiste Algier was the chess master who played Napoleon. Jacques Francois-Moré played in France. He said, and William Schlumberger mostly operated it during its time in the United States. Other men behind the machine included Aaron Alexander and William Lewis. However, no one knows who was inside the cabinet during the initial performance in front of Empress Maria Teresa. One of the Turks' most famous opponents was Charles Babbage, who lost to the Turk twice. He's significant because he actually created the world's first mechanical computing device, the difference engine,

which will be the subject of a future episode. It couldn't really be said that computers were better than humans at chess until 1996 when IBM's deep blue computer beat the reigning world champion Gary Kasparov. The legacy of the Mechanical Turk can still be found today. Amazon is a service called The Mechanical Turk, where you could hire people to perform simple tasks online that can't otherwise be easily done by a computer. The fact that the Mechanical Turk is still remembered 230 years after it was created,

however, might have been Wolfgang von Kemperlin's greatest trick. The associate producers of Everything Everywhere Daily are Peter Bennett and Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please join the list of patrons over at patreon.com. And also remember, if you leave a review or send me a question, you two can have it read on the show.