Skip to content

The Turk: The 18th-Century Chess Machine With a Human Inside

Abstract

The Mechanical Turk was a chess-playing automaton built in 1769–70 by Wolfgang von Kempelen for the Habsburg court of Empress Maria Theresa. A wooden figure dressed in Ottoman robes sat at a cabinet and played chess against human opponents, beating the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte and (by most accounts) Benjamin Franklin over a touring career that lasted from 1770 until it burned in 1854. The machine was not an automaton; it was a cabinet carefully constructed to hide a strong chess player inside. The Turk is a cautionary tale about the difference between appearing intelligent and being intelligent, and gave its name to Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform, which does with humans what the Turk did with chess.

The Mechanism

Wolfgang von Kempelen, born in Pressburg (now Bratislava) in 1734, was a Habsburg civil servant and amateur inventor who also built a speaking machine. In 1769 he watched a French conjurer perform magnet tricks at the Vienna court, remarked that he could do better, and was told by Maria Theresa to try. The Turk was usually dated to spring 1770, but the Kempelen scholar Ernst Strouhal has shown that it was finished and demonstrated in summer 1769. The construction was clever: the cabinet beneath the chess-playing figure contained a sliding mechanism that allowed a small human chess player to move behind a false back as the cabinet’s doors were opened for inspection, appearing to leave no room for a person.

The chess-playing figure, dressed in robes, with a turban (reflecting the contemporary European fascination with Ottoman culture, hence “Turk”), moved its pieces with its left arm. The hidden player steered the arm with a pantograph over a small chessboard of his own, opened and closed the hand with a lever, and used a system of magnets beneath the chess board to track the game and a candle for light, manipulating mechanical controls to move the automaton’s arm.

Kempelen took it on tour in the 1780s. After his death in 1804 the showman Johann Nepomuk Mälzel bought it and in 1826 took it to the United States; in Baltimore in 1827 two boys saw a man climb out of it, and a newspaper reported the fact. In 1836, Edgar Allan Poe published an essay arguing that the Turk must conceal a human player, the machine’s play was too inconsistent for a true automaton. Poe’s logic was correct though not conclusive. The secret was only fully revealed in 1857, in a series of articles by Silas Mitchell (son of the Turk’s last owner) for The Chess Monthly, three years after the machine had been destroyed by fire; George Allen’s History of the Automaton Chess-Player in America of the same year gave the details.

Famous Opponents

The Turk defeated Napoleon in 1809 at Schönbrunn (Napoleon reportedly tried to cheat on multiple moves and was rebuffed). Benjamin Franklin encountered it in Paris in 1783. A widely repeated story has Frederick the Great playing it at Potsdam, but there is no contemporary evidence the encounter happened, the tale first surfaced in the early 19th century and is regarded as apocryphal. The Turk was at various points owned by Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, Johann Nepomuk Mälzel (a musician who also possessed Beethoven’s ear trumpets), and the Chinese Museum in Philadelphia, where it burned in an 1854 fire.

The chess players who hid inside included several Austrian and German masters; their identities were carefully kept secret and most are not definitively known.

Copies and Successors

The Turk was copied for a century. The Italian engineer Giuseppe Morosi showed a wooden chess-playing Turk in Paris around 1800 for 30 sous and told visitors that it worked through prearranged combinations, with his help when an opponent strayed from them. The Walker brothers showed an “American Chess Player” in New York in 1827. The cabinetmaker Charles Hooper’s Ajeeb (1868) played at the Crystal Palace in London until 1876 and spent three months in Berlin in 1877; one Ajeeb burned in 1929. The German idiom einen Türken bauen (“to build a Turk”, to fake something) was used in the Reichstag on February 18, 1880, and may come from Ajeeb’s Berlin visit. Mephisto, built in London by the Hamburg-born Charles Godfrey Gumpel and first shown in 1878, probably moved its arm by electromagnets under remote control by a hidden master, Isidor Gunsberg among them; its last appearance was at the Paris World’s Fair of 1889.

The modern replicas came from the magic world and from museums. The illusion builder John Gaughan spent five years and $120,000 on a reconstruction, shown in Los Angeles in 1989, which uses the original chessboard that survived the 1854 fire. The Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn built a working copy in its own workshop from Joseph zu Racknitz’s 1789 description; it played its first game on March 25, 2004, the eve of the 200th anniversary of Kempelen’s death, and drew by perpetual check after seventeen and a half minutes.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

Jeff Bezos named Amazon Mechanical Turk (launched 2005) after the historical Turk, a platform where computers appear to perform intelligent tasks but the actual intelligence is provided by humans working behind the screen. Requesters post Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs); workers complete them for small fees. The platform explicitly inverts the original Turk: rather than hiding the human to make the machine seem intelligent, it makes the humans invisible to make the software seem more capable.

The joke Bezos embedded in the name (“artificial artificial intelligence”) acknowledges the fundamental limitation that inspired the original Turk: building systems that appear to think when they do not, either by hiding mechanical cleverness (the original) or by hiding human labor (Amazon’s version).

📚 Sources