All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
July 21, 2015 - Skeptoid
15:29
Skeptoid #476: The Chess-Playing Mechanical Turk

An overview of the amazing chess playing robot of the 1700s. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
The Mystery of the Turk 00:07:25
For 80 years, in the 18th and 19th centuries, a chess-playing automaton toured the world, somehow defeating heads of state and expert chess players alike.
Is it possible that someone developed a mechanical technology capable of mastering this incredibly complex game?
Or is it something we should be skeptical of?
The mechanical Turk is today on Skeptoid.
Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.
You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that.
I'm doing something else now.
I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed.
On every episode of Hyperfixed, listeners write in with their problems and I try to solve them.
Some massive and life-altering, and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind.
No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you.
That's Hyperfixed, the new podcast from Radiotopia.
Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
The chess-playing mechanical Turk.
Today we're headed back in time, all the way back to the Vienna court of Empress Maria Teresa of Austria-Hungary, in the year 1770.
There, the scientific polymath Werner von Kempelen, then 36 years old, brought forth a mechanical automaton, the figure of a man seated at a large wooden chess table, the cabinet below filled with clockwork.
A volunteer from the audience stepped forward.
Kempelin wound up the machine and it reached out and made the first move, the clockwork whirring and ticking.
The astonished volunteer was quickly defeated.
Delighted with the mechanical marvel, Maria Teresa ordered many more performances.
In fact, the Turk, as it was nicknamed for its Turkish clothing, toured the world for the next 80 years, defeating the world's top chess players, plus luminaries such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin, without anyone ever discovering its secrets.
Although many skeptics published fine articles purporting that the Turk actually contained a child, dwarf, or legless adult chess player, or that it may have been secretly controlled by its exhibitor, the workings of the Turk remained one of history's best-kept secrets.
But all secrets are fleeting, and shortly before the Turk's destruction in an 1854 fire, its last owner's son, Silas Mitchell, published The Revelation, proving that no skeptic had ever correctly guessed how it worked.
In fact, no one had even come close.
Over the years, three authors in particular had put forth the best-known hypotheses, and Kempelin had fooled them all.
But the most intriguing mystery about the Turk would not turn out to be how it worked, but rather why a man like Kempelin would have built it.
Kempelin was no Barnum.
He was neither a showman nor a magician.
He was an inventor and engineer of the highest caliber and held a series of important public works appointments in Maria Theresa's government.
The last thing he'd do would be to construct some sort of sideshow trick.
The first of the three most notable proposed explanations came in 1789 by Joseph Friedrich Freiherr Zurachnitz.
He wrote a book based on his many viewings of the Turk and his friendship with Kempelin.
Rachnitz noted that the Turk's exhibitor would always first open and close the cabinet's various doors for the audience's inspection.
He concluded that a very small human operator was inside the cabinet, lying flat during the opening of the doors, and then during gameplay, sat up, played the game on a small secondary chessboard, and watched magnetized needles on the bottom of the tabletop to learn what move the opponent had made.
By Racknitz's measurements, the hidden human would have had to be less than five feet tall and less than seven inches high when lying flat.
Kempelin refused to offer any assessment of Racknitz's proposed solution.
In 1821, Robert Willis, an engineer of musical instruments, published a pamphlet with his own explanation of the Turk.
Willis noted in particular that the order in which the doors were opened for inspection never varied.
This, he proposed, was to allow a hidden human operator to move from one part of the cabinet to another, allowing the various cabinets to be shown empty in sequence.
Then, to play, the operator would sit up, place his own hand inside the Turk's arm, and watch the board through the thin fabric shirt covering the Turk's chest.
The best-known analysis was that of Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1835, which ultimately found in favor of Willis's explanation, but differed in that it offered far deeper reasoned analysis of why it must be so.
For example, Poe noted that William Schlumberger, secretary of the Turk's current owner and exhibitor, Johann Melzil, was never present during the performances, and that when he was ill, the Turk did not perform.
Poe also reasoned that although the Turk won most of its games, it did sometimes lose, whereas a truly mechanical solution would be incapable of error.
Like Kempelin before him, Melzil refused to respond to any such guesses.
It wasn't until Melzil himself died that the Poe's family doctor, John Mitchell, purchased the Turk at an estate auction for $400 in 1840.
To finance it, he founded a club, each member of which paid $5 or $10 and was let in on the secret.
At last, the Turk's true workings were published in 1857 by Dr. Mitchell's son, Silas.
The solution?
Drumroll, please?
The Turk was indeed controlled by a human operator hidden inside.
But due to Kempelin's ingenuity in designing its interior and moving panels, there was no need for the operator to be small.
Any average adult would fit.
This allowed Kempelin and Melzil to hire the finest chess players available, including, as Poe had surmised, Schlumberger.
No known record survives of any of the players engaged by Kempelin, but author Tom Standage managed to track down most of Melzil's operators for his excellent book, The Turk.
As many had guessed, the operator did move around during the display of the cabinet's interior, though on a sliding seat gliding soundlessly on greased rails.
The operator did play on a small secondary chessboard inside and did watch the game via magnetic indicators on the underside of the board above.
To move the Turk's arm, Kemplin had designed what was essentially a pantograph.
When the Turk moved, the operator would move a small arm over the chess man on his secondary board, twist its end to open and close the Turk's fingers, and to lift and move the pieces.
All of the operator's movements smoothly reproduced via the armature extending through the Turk's hand.
The operator also had controls to shake the Turk's head, roll its eyes, strike its fist upon the table, or make some especially noisy clockwork run to cover any noises like coughs.
Kemplin's Mechanical Engineering 00:06:44
There was also a means of simple communication between the exhibitor and the operator, a small knob with a pointer that could be set by either person to the numbers 0 through 9, the meaning of which could be whatever they planned.
This might be used by the operator to inform the exhibitor that his candle had gone out, that he wished to retire from the current game, or anything else.
The Turk was in fact not an automaton at all, but merely a magician's prop.
It was clever and well-built, but was not revolutionary and was not unworthy of Kempelin's extraordinary talents and predilection for hard science.
Why then had such a man gone to the trouble of building it and spent so much of the latter half of his life traveling around Europe as a showman?
It was completely out of character for him.
Hey everyone, I want to remind you about a truly unique and once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
Join me and Mediterranean archaeologist Dr. Flint Dibble for a skeptoid sailing adventure through the Mediterranean Sea aboard the SV Royal Clipper, the world's largest full-rigged sailing ship.
This is also the only opportunity you'll have to hear Flint and I talk about our experiences when we both went on Joe Rogan to represent the causes of science and reality against whatever it is that you get when you're thrown into that lion pit.
We set sail from Málaga, Spain on April 18th, 2026 and finished the adventure in Nice, France on April 25th.
You'll enjoy a fascinating skeptical mini-conference at sea.
You'll visit amazing ports along the Spanish and French coasts and Flint will be our exclusive onboard expert sharing the real archaeology and history about every stop.
We've got special side quests and extra skeptical content planned at each port.
This is a true sailing ship.
You can climb the rat lines to the crow's nest, handle the sails.
You can even take the helm and steer.
This is a real bucket list adventure you don't want to miss.
But cabins are selling fast and this ship does always sell out.
Act now or you'll miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Get the full details and book your cabin at skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Hope to see you on board.
That's skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Somewhat paradoxically, the key lies in Kemplin's position as a scientist and engineer for his government.
Most of his European tours were by official command.
Once the word spread across Europe that Empress Maria Theresa had an extraordinary chess-playing automaton that could challenge all comers, official visitors to Austria-Hungary nearly always requested demonstrations.
Kempelin had dismantled the mechanism when he was ordered to bring it back for a party of Russian dignitaries.
Kemplin was most distraught when he was told to take it on a two-year tour of Europe, including France, England, and Germany, all under the closest scientific scrutiny.
Imagine Kempelin's state of mind.
The engineer responsible for Austria-Hungary's great hydraulic waterworks, forced to perform an illusion for his fellow scientists worldwide, all the while having to smile and claim the device was a true automaton.
His solace was his ongoing work in artificial speech machines, one of which Melzil later adapted to make the Turk say, check, in the desired language.
He must have asked himself a thousand times how he ever could have gotten into this awkward position.
The answer to that was found in the character of his patron, the Empress Maria Theresa.
She loved science, physics, and engineering and adored Kempelin's work.
She was also uncharacteristically skeptical for her day, once pardoning a condemned witch with the comment, witches can only be found where there is ignorance, and was a pioneer in advocating for inoculation against smallpox.
It was in her pursuit of her skeptical interests that she first begged Kimplin to accompany her to a performance by a French conjurer named Pelletier, hoping he might be able to explain to her how the tricks were accomplished.
Kimplin's response was to offer a challenge that his scientific ingenuity could produce an automaton capable of giving a performance more impressive and mystifying than any she had yet seen.
And neither of them realizing the impact it would have on the rest of Kempelin's life, Maria Teresa accepted, excusing him from his official duties for six months in order that he might deliver on his promise.
The result of this challenge was the Turk.
And this was where Kempelin's genius shone through.
Besides its decoy clockwork and its crucial pantograph controls, there was nothing especially marvelous about the Turk from an engineering perspective.
Instead, Kimplin had had to create a masterpiece in a field that was far outside his expertise, the stagecraft of a magician.
Kimplin learned how to fool an audience.
He taught himself the order and manner in which to reveal the contents of the cabinets, even lighting them inside to apparently prove the absence of a human operator.
The Turk's largest cabinet was empty by necessity to give the operator room to move and work, so Kimplin turned this liability into an advantage.
He crafted a small wooden casket stored inside this empty space, thus giving the empty space an apparent function.
Then for the performance, Kimplin removed the casket and set it on the stage a short distance away, occasionally touching or moving it, thus creating a diversion that led the audience to suspect he was using it to somehow control the Turk's moves.
The Turk was not a mechanical wonder.
It was a magnificent achievement in the art of magician's stagecraft.
By the time of Kemplin's death in 1804, at the age of 70, he had managed to somewhat distance himself from what had turned out to be his most notorious accomplishment.
His patron, Maria Teresa, was long dead, and Kemplin had kept his post through several of her successors, continuing his civil engineering to the degree that his health allowed.
The Turk successfully disassembled and packed away into forgotten crates, its secrets safe and all but forgotten.
Kimplin lived amid circles of philosophers, scientists, engineers, writers, and artists, in the wealth and comfort bestowed upon him by his government.
After he passed, the inscription on his monument, Non Orbis Moriar, was ultimately to prove more than a little prophetic.
Not entirely do I die.
Secrets Packaged Away 00:01:16
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello, everyone.
This is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and mousse.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile non-profit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the teacher's toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From PRX
Export Selection