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

Zusammenfassung

The Mechanical Turk was a chess-playing automaton built in 1770 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, a Hungarian inventor at the Habsburg court, built the Turk in 1770 reportedly to impress Empress Maria Theresa after she had been unimpressed by another court magician. 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 a mechanical arm. The hidden player 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.

The Turk continued to tour for half a century after Kempelen’s death in 1804, under multiple owners. 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.

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.

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).

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