The Mechanical Turk; the True Story Of the Mysterious Chess Playing Machine that Gripped the World.
by Tom Standage.
Penguin. 274 pages.

I used to be a chess fan until Big Blue, by sheer number-crunching power and limitless endurance wore down the greatest living chess player, Garry Kasparov, and pre-empted the game for me. Bobby Fischer’s Anti-Semitism and ever-increasing creep-quotient (or Creep-Q, which now towers well beyond whatever I.Q. the fabled payer is rumored to possess) did not help matters either.

This book, however, gives back a little of that old magic to a subject that is now “human, all too human.” The Mechanical Turk traces the history of one of the most fascinating automatons of the 19th century. This machine was the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s pioneering foray into rational detection (yet Standage points out that Poe might have cribbed his expose of the Turk from an earlier pamphlet), and for Ambrose Bierce’s “Moxon’s Master.” These are the two sources that first introduced me to “Maelzel’s Chess Player” as he was known to Poe and other 19th century Americans.

But the history of this celebrated hoax goes back much earlier to the 18th century. Standage introduces us to the Vienese genius Wolfgang von Kempelen, who created the machine as an answer to a supercillious French magician, who attempted to condescend to Queen Maria Theresa’s court while explaining the intricacies of magnetism. Von Kempelen declaired that he would produce a machine that would become the wonder of the age, far outstripping anything mere French magicians could produce, and he was quite correct. Later, he distanced himself from his creation, but after his death it assumed a life of its own, and, under various handlers, it toured Europe and America, playing–and winning– against such luminaries as Napoleon, Frederick the Great, and Benjamin Franklin. It also lost to real chess luminaries such as Philidor, but, inexlicably, it also lost to average joe schmoes from chess clubs across the globe.

Of course it was a hoax. Many people suspected this to be the case, but Standage gives us the cultural background to the Turk’s odd fame, sketching brief histories of the celebrated automaton maker Vaucanson and his amazing “mechanical duck”–also something of a hoax–and other creators of pre-robots, and this allows us to understand why what appears little more than a crude toy to 21st century eyes grown dim from too much staring into computer screens, would inspire the likes of Charles Babbage to begin the long road to automation, the creation of computers and artificial intelligence, and the eventual defeat of Garry Kasparov, which explains my sadness every time I look at a chess board. I shudder at the thought of other human activities being pre-empted and “shut out” by robot Mozarts and Beethovens or da Vincis,or Shakespeares or Alice Walkers,or Michael Jordans or Joe DiMaggios–all of which is scheduled to happen within the next 50 years or so. I can’t wait.