page_title: The Turk
section_title: Legacy and popular culture
hierarchical_section_title: The Turk / Legacy and popular culture
context_page_description: The Turk, also known as the Mechanical Turk or Automaton Chess Player was a trick chess-playing machine. First put on show in 1770, the machine was in use until it was destroyed in a fire in 1854. It was later found to be a hoax. It was built in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen to impress the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. The machine could play chess against a human. It could also perform the knight's tour, a puzzle where a player moves a knight to every square of a chessboard exactly once.
  The Turk was not a real machine, but a mechanical illusion. There was a person inside the machine working the controls. With a skilled chess player hidden inside the box, the Turk won most of the games. It played and won games against many people including Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. The chess players who secretly worked inside the box included Johann Allgaier, Hyacinthe Henri Boncourt, Aaron Alexandre, William Lewis, Jacques Mouret, and William Schlumberger.
context_section_description: The Turk inspired a number of inventions and copies. These included the Ajeeb, or "The Egyptian", built by Charles Hopper that President Grover Cleveland played in 1885; and Mephisto, the self-described "most famous" machine, of which little is known. The Walkers made the "American Chess Player" first shown in May 1827 in New York. El Ajedrecista was built in 1912 by Leonardo Torres y Quevedo and first shown at the Paris World Fair of 1914. It was the first true chess-playing automaton, and a precursor of sorts to Deep Blue.
  Other people were inspired by the Turk. The Rev. Edmund Cartwright saw it in London in 1784. He later wrote "it is more difficult to construct a machine that shall weave than one which shall make all the variety of moves required in that complicated game". Cartwright would later invent the power loom. Sir Charles Wheatstone, an inventor, saw the Turk while it was owned by Mälzel. Mälzel later showed his speaking machines to the researcher and his teenage son. Alexander Graham Bell read a copy of a book by Wolfgang von Kempelen on speaking machines after seeing a similar machine built by Wheatstone. Bell went on to invent the telephone.
  A play, The Automaton Chess Player, was performed in New York City in 1845. The play used a copy of the Turk made by J. Walker, who had earlier built the Walker Chess-player.
  Raymond Bernard's silent movie, The Chess Player (The Chess Player, France 1927), uses the story of the Turk in an adventure tale set during the Partitions of Poland in 1772. A Polish nationalist escaping from the  Russians, also happens to be an expert chess player. He is hidden inside a chess playing automaton called the Turk. Just as he is about to escape over the border, the machine is taken to Saint Petersburg for the empress Catherine II. Copying the Napoleon incident, Catherine attempts to cheat the Turk, who sweeps all the pieces from the board.
  The Turk has been used novels and stories: 
  In 1849, Edgar Allan Poe published a tale "Von Kempelen and His Discovery".
  Ambrose Bierce's short story "Moxon's Master", published in 1909, is a story about a chess-playing automaton like the Turk.
  In 1938, John Dickson Carr published The Crooked Hinge, in his Dr. Gideon Fell detective novels
  Gene Wolfe's 1977 science fiction short story "The Marvellous Brass Chessplaying Automaton" also has a machine like the Turk.
  Robert Loehr's 2007 novel "The Chess Machine" (published in the UK as "The Secrets of the Chess Machine") is a story about the man inside the machine.
  F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre's 2007 story "The Clockwork Horror" tells of Edgar Allan Poe's meeting with the Turk.
  Walter Benjamin mentions the Turk his Theses on the Philosophy of History (Über den Begriff der Geschichte), written in 1940.
  In 2005, Amazon.com launched the Amazon Mechanical Turk. The program is designed to have humans perform tasks with which computers struggle, such as color comparisons.
caption: An advertisement for the Ajeeb, a copy of the Turk
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