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Ashta’s chess tales

The machine with a man inside

Vienna, 1770 · 2 minute read

It beat emperors at chess. It also had a secret.

In 1770 an inventor named Wolfgang von Kempelen wheeled a wooden cabinet into the palace in Vienna. Behind it sat a life-sized figure in a turban and robes, with a chessboard in front of it. People called it the Turk.

Kempelen opened the cabinet doors and held a candle inside to show wheels, cogs and levers. Then he closed them, wound the machine up — and it played chess. It picked up pieces with its wooden hand. It beat nearly everyone.

The Turk toured Europe and America for more than eighty years. It is said to have played Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin. Clever people wrote whole books trying to explain how a machine could think.

It could not. Hidden inside the cabinet, on a sliding seat, was a strong human chess player. He followed the game on a small board of his own and worked the figure’s arm with levers. The cogs were for show.

The Turk was destroyed in a fire in 1854, and its secret came out soon after.

It was a trick. But it made thousands of people ask a real question: could a machine ever truly play chess? It took another two hundred years to answer.