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The Turk: The 18th-Century Chess Machine With a Human Inside

Abstract

The Mechanical Turk was a chess-playing automaton built in 1769–70 by Wolfgang von Kempelen for the Habsburg court of Empress Maria Theresa. A wooden figure dressed in Ottoman robes sat at a cabinet and played chess against human opponents, beating Napoleon Bonaparte and playing Benjamin Franklin over a touring career that lasted from 1770 until it burned in 1854. The machine was not an automaton; it was a cabinet carefully constructed to hide a strong chess player inside. The Turk is a cautionary tale about the difference between appearing intelligent and being intelligent, and gave its name to Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform (2005–2026), which does with humans what the Turk did with chess.

The Mechanism

Wolfgang von Kempelen, born in Pressburg (now Bratislava) in 1734, was a Habsburg civil servant and amateur inventor who also built a speaking machine. In 1769 he watched a French conjurer perform magnet tricks at the Vienna court, remarked that he could do better, and was told by Maria Theresa to try. The Turk was usually dated to spring 1770, but the Kempelen scholar Ernst Strouhal has shown that it was finished and demonstrated in summer 1769. The construction was clever: the cabinet beneath the chess-playing figure contained a sliding mechanism that allowed a small human chess player to move behind a false back as the cabinet’s doors were opened for inspection, appearing to leave no room for a person.

The chess-playing figure, dressed in robes, with a turban (reflecting the contemporary European fascination with Ottoman culture, hence “Turk”), moved its pieces with its left arm. The hidden player steered the arm with a pantograph over a small chessboard of his own, opened and closed the hand with a lever, and used a system of magnets beneath the chess board to track the game and a candle for light, manipulating mechanical controls to move the automaton’s arm.

Kempelen took it on tour in the 1780s. In 1805, a year after his death, the showman Johann Nepomuk Mälzel bought it from Kempelen’s son and in 1826 took it to the United States. In Baltimore in 1827 the operator, William Schlumberger, fainted from the heat and climbed out; two boys on a neighbouring roof saw him, and the Baltimore Gazette reported it on 1 June 1827, to little effect. In 1836, Edgar Allan Poe published an essay arguing that the Turk must conceal a human player. His conclusion was right, though many of his specific arguments were wrong. The secret was only fully revealed in 1857, in a series of articles by Silas Mitchell (son of the Turk’s last owner) for The Chess Monthly, three years after the machine had been destroyed by fire. George Allen’s “The Automaton Chess-Player in America”, published in 1859 in Willard Fiske’s Book of the First American Chess Congress, added the history.

Famous Opponents

The Turk defeated Napoleon in 1809 at Schönbrunn (Napoleon reportedly tried to cheat on multiple moves and was rebuffed). Benjamin Franklin encountered it in Paris in 1783. A widely repeated story has Frederick the Great playing it at Potsdam, but there is no contemporary evidence the encounter happened, the tale first surfaced in the early 19th century and is regarded as apocryphal. Mälzel, an inventor who also made ear trumpets for Beethoven, sold the Turk in 1811 to Prince Eugène de Beauharnais and bought it back in 1815. After Mälzel’s death in 1838 it passed to the Philadelphia physician John Kearsley Mitchell, who presented it at Nathan Dunn’s former Chinese Museum building in Philadelphia, where it burned on 5 July 1854.

The operators’ names were kept secret at the time, but several are now known: Johann Allgaier, Boncourt, Aaron Alexandre, William Lewis, Jacques Mouret and William Schlumberger. Who played inside during Kempelen’s own demonstrations is not known.

Copies and Successors

The Turk was copied for a century. The Italian engineer Giuseppe Morosi showed a wooden chess-playing Turk in Paris around 1800 for 30 sous and told visitors that it worked through prearranged combinations, with his help when an opponent strayed from them. The Walker brothers showed an “American Chess Player” in New York in 1827. The cabinetmaker Charles Hooper’s Ajeeb (1868) played at the Crystal Palace in London until 1876 and spent three months in Berlin in 1877; one Ajeeb burned in 1929. The German idiom einen Türken bauen (“to build a Turk”, to fake something) was used in the Reichstag on February 18, 1880, and may come from Ajeeb’s Berlin visit. Mephisto, built in London by the German-born Charles Godfrey Gumpel and first shown in 1878, probably moved its arm by electromagnets under remote control by a hidden master, Isidor Gunsberg among them; its last appearance was at the Paris World’s Fair of 1889.

The modern replicas came from the magic world and from museums. The illusion builder John Gaughan spent five years (1984–1989) and $120,000 on a reconstruction, first shown in November 1989 at a magic-history conference in Los Angeles. It uses the original chessboard, which had been stored separately and survived the 1854 fire. The Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn built a working copy in its own workshop from Joseph zu Racknitz’s 1789 description; it played its first game on March 25, 2004, the eve of the 200th anniversary of Kempelen’s death, and drew by perpetual check after seventeen and a half minutes.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

Amazon named its crowdsourcing service Amazon Mechanical Turk (launched November 2005) after the chess machine. Requesters post Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), small jobs that software still handles badly, such as labelling images or transcribing audio; workers complete them for small fees, and to the requester’s program the results arrive through an API as if a machine had produced them. Jeff Bezos called this “artificial artificial intelligence”. The arrangement is the Turk’s own: a person hidden inside something that looks like a machine.

Amazon announced the service’s closure on 25 August 2026 without giving a reason, and the last tasks could be submitted on 30 September 2026, after 21 years. By then a 2023 EPFL study had estimated that a third or more of the workers it surveyed were completing text tasks with the help of large language models.

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