In 1770, the first chess mechanism was built by the Hungarian engineer Wolfgang von Kempelen. The device in the form of a seated Turk has become the most famous chess machine in the history of mankind.
What was the "chess Turk" like? It consisted of a 1 meter high wooden box with a large chessboard on top. The box stood on brass rollers, which allowed the engineer Kempelen to move it freely. This solution also raised the device above the ground so that the crowd of spectators could see that there was nothing underneath. A figure in oriental clothes with a turban on his head sat at the chessboard.
Before the start of the game, Kempelen opened the door on the left side of the case, and showed his "ingenious mechanism", which consisted of gears and springs. To enhance the effect, the inventor lit a candle behind the mechanism, and the light from it shone through the entire mechanism. Closing the door, he turned the key and started the car.
After that, the Turk's figure began to move, brought its left hand to the figure, took it and made a move. Everyone noted that the figure was too small for someone to sit inside it, and that the “Turk” looked artificial. But he performed his moves with mechanical precision.
After the first demonstrations at the court, Kempelen drove his apparatus throughout Europe, came to Russia. Many famous people played with the "mechanical Turk", and after the death of Kempelen, the next owner, the Austrian mechanic Melzel, played several games of the "Turk" with Napoleon Bonaparte himself. Meltzel even took the mechanism to America, where Edgar Allan Poe was impressed by the chess apparatus and even wrote an article about it.
Could such a mechanism, created in the 18th century, be a real chess apparatus?
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The answer was given in January 1857 by Silas Mitchell. His father bought the machine gun after Melzel's death in 1838 to satisfy his curiosity. He discovered that a person could sit inside the device, since the visible mechanism demonstrated before the start of the game occupied only one third of the length of the box. The person sitting inside was supposed to be an undoubted chess master. He had a hidden second chessboard, he moved a metal pointer, which was connected to the Turk's hand through a system of levers to move the corresponding piece on the outer board.
The ingenious system of magnets helped the player to track the opponent's moves: metal balls on strings, suspended from the bottom of the main field, were attracted to the corresponding cells of the board when a piece was placed on the field, and hung freely when there were no pieces on them.
Kempelen, and later Melzel, had to use the best chess players to create the glory he received for the mechanical Turk.
As soon as the secret of the stunt was revealed, Mitchell sold the car to a Chinese museum in Philadelphia, interest in him quickly faded. In 1854, during a fire, the "Turks" burned down.
In April 2004, the Heinz Nixdorf Museum in Paderborn made a copy of the "Mechanical Turk" - 200 years after Kempelen's death.
