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The Turk
by Tom Standage

Reviewed by David Surratt

9/1/02

The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine, by Tom Standage. Published by Walker & Co., April 25th, 2002. A paperback edition is expected from Berkley in the Spring of 2003.

272 pages, hardbound, list price $24.00, although at the time of this writing I found it online for as little as $15.12 new.

The UK edition was published under the title The Mechanical Turk: The True Story of the Chess-Playing Machine That Fooled the World.

The Turk, strictly speaking, is not a chess book. Oh, plenty of chess authors have reviewed it, including Taylor Kingston at Chess Cafe (pdf format), Alex Dunne at Correspondence Chess News, and John Henderson in The Scotsman (entry for June 26th) as well as plenty of non-chess sites, including CNN.com, The Guardian Unlimited, and US News and World Report; there is even an audio interview with the author on National Public Radio. It is also true that The Turk was a chess-playing automaton, and that the author knows how the pieces move. None of which makes it a book about chess.

"On an autumn day in 1769, Wolfgang von Kempelen, a thirty-five-year-old Hungarian civil servant, was summoned to the imperial court in Vienna by Maria Theresa, empress of Austria-Hungary, to witness the performance of a visiting French conjuror. Kempelen was well versed in physics, mechanics, and hydraulics, and was a trusted servant of the empress. She had invited him on a whim because she wanted to see what an expert in scientific matters would make of the conjuror's tricks. Yet the performance was to change the course of Kempelen's life. It set in motion a chain of events that led him to construct an extraordinary machine: a mechanical man, dressed in an oriental costume, seated behind a wooden cabinet, and capable of playing chess."

So begins the preface to this remarkable account of the famous Turk, the chess-playing automaton that was to astonish and delight not just the courts of Europe, but the commoners as well, on at least four continents before its final retirement. The general story of the Turk is already well known among most chess-players, including the "secret" behind the Turk's remarkable performances. Standage saves the revelations of exactly how the Turk accomplished its feats for the final chapters, and for those not yet familiar with the story, I shall follow suit.

The feats themselves, however, were no secret. The Turk didn't just play a pre-programmed series of moves, like completing the Knight's Tour or "solving" chess puzzles, although it did those too. The amazing phenomenon of the Turk was that it could play against human opponents, and almost always win! It played regular games, it played either side (opponent's choice) of a set of endgame positions, it corrected it's opponent's illegal moves, it did things no other automaton was capable of even emulating. Standage writes, "The Turk's sensational performance astonished and delighted the empress, and at her behest Kempelen and his automaton made many more appearances before additional members of the royal family, government ministers of both Austria-Hungary and foreign countries, and other eminent visitors to the court. Kempelen's extraordinary creation became the talk of Vienna, and it soon became more widely known as letters describing the automaton were published in newspapers and journals overseas."

In the eighteenth century, automata and other mechanical devices were captivating the attention not just of the royal courts, but of people all over Europe. Soon the principles behind these devices would change all of their lives, and one wonders just how many witnesses to these mechanical marvels wondered themselves about the new age they were entering. Unfortunately, this did not become a focus of this book, leaving me wanting more about the industrial revolution which was to follow, but this was not a book on industry, either. Standage does, however, do an excellent job of grounding the Turk in it's historical context, including the development of automata, how the Turk fit into that picture, and how it relates to us still today.

Chapter one begins with the assertion that almost all modern technology, from computers to CD players, find their origins in the elaborate mechanical toys of which the Turk is representative. "The first automata were essentially scaled-down versions of the elaborate mechanical clocks that adorned cathedrals across Europe from medieval times. As well as displaying the time, these clocks often had astronomical features (such as the phase of the moon) and, in some cases, entire mechanical theaters that sprang to life on particular occasions." From there Standage traces the development of automata up to the creation of the Turk.

For it's creator, Wolfgang von Kempelen, the Turk was a means to an end. His ambitions extended well beyond the Turk, to the creation of a machine which could reproduce human speech, but he needed money, and access to materials. In other words, he needed Royal patronage. One early writer about the Turk "caused news of the automaton to spread throughout Europe, somewhat to Kempelen's embarrassment; he had not expected [the Turk] to cause such a sensation. He had, however, achieved his objective. For the ingenuity of the Turk so impressed [Maria Theresa, the empress of Austria-Hungary] that she recalled Kempelen from Banat and awarded him a generous additional allowance equal to his annual salary. More important, now that the Turk had proved Kempelen's engineering prowess, she gave him several engineering tasks to perform in addition to his court duties...The success of the Turk launched Kemelen's parallel career as an engineer and man of science, which he pursued in addition to his duties as a civil servant."

Kempelen's work on the mechanism of human speech eventually established his reputation as the founder of the discipline known today as experimental phonetics. The last of his speaking machines survives in the Museum of Science and Technology in Munich. A copy of this machine was demonstrated in 1863 for an audience that included a young boy. That boy, inspired by the demonstration, set out to build his own speaking machine. In 1876 his research paid off, when that boy, Alexander Graham Bell, invented the telephone.

Another young man who became inspired by the Turk and other automata was Charles Babbage. Babbage went on to achieve fame as the designer of a series of mechanical computers, elaborate machines capable of simulating logical calculation. Another of Babbage's machines was so complex that Standage says it was "inarguably the earliest ancestor of the modern digital computer: it had direct mechanical equivalents of a modern computer's processor and memory." Standage points out that "These machines, like the Turk, would be the subject of arguments about the possibility of machine intelligence." Babbage also tried to invent a chess-playing machine, and as a result of his efforts, "the subjects of chess, intelligence, and computing were well on their way to becoming inextricably intertwined."

From these beginnings, The Turk follows the trail of the chess-playing enigma as it traversed four continents, changing hands several times, and at last winding up in the hands of Johan Nepomuk Maelzel. It was Maelzel who brought the Turk to the Americas, where competition and ingenuity soon produced a rival - the American Chess Player, which was first displayed in 1827 at the American Museum in New York. Standage continues to follow the trail of the Turk all the way to its fiery end in 1854.

While Standage's earlier work may have received criticism as "largely anecdotal" and lacking "real research" (however unjustifiably - he doesn't claim to be a historian, asserting his books to be popular works) The Turk is rife with the trappings of a well-researched historical account. There are six pages of notes, and six more documenting his sources. Standage did not rely solely on previous author's work, however, on which to base his account. Original correspondence with the holders of historical documents, as well as a personal visit to the workshop of a modern-day Kempelen are part of the effort that has helped to craft a story that is at once scholarly and personal.

From the Empress of Austria-Hungary, to Benjamin Franklin, to Catherine the Great, to Napoleon Bonaparte, to Edgar Allen Poe, the Turk lived a long and prosperous life, full of adventure and excitement. It's legacy lives on today, and The Turk is an excellent read about our past and our future. Who knows where today's new "toys" might one day lead us? Take The Turk with you on vacation, or on the train, or set it on your bedside. It is sure to entertain and inform you. That's the kind of book it is, the kind I read twice - it was that enjoyable.

The book's website includes a biography of the author, an interview with the author, the preface and first chapter of the book, and a gallery of illustrations from the book. Tom Standage's site also has a page devoted to the Turk. Other web resources include:

A review at The Chess Cafe of the Turk, Chess Automatan by Gerald Levitt, and
Reprint of Edgar Allen Poe's "solution" of the mystery of the Turk, originally published in the Southern Literary Journal in April 1836.
Reprinted article on Maelzel's Chess Player (aka the Turk) written in 1835 in two parts, but this may be the same article by Poe.
Article in Wired Magazine by Tom Standage on the Turk.

Tom Standage was born in London England, currently residing in Greenwich England with his wife Kirstin, and daughter, Ella. He studied engineering and computer theory at Dulwich College and Oxford University. After graduation he covered science and technology for a variety of newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, The Independent, Wired, FEED, and Prospect. He has also appeared as a technology and new media pundit on BBC television and radio. Former Deputy Editor of the Daily Telegraph’s technology supplement "Connected", Standage is now Technology Reporter for The Economist. The Turk is his third book, following on the heels of The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers and The Neptune File: A Story of Astronomical Rivalry and the Pioneers of Planet Hunting.

Interview questions and other pronouncements of the author from promotional materials supplied by the publisher:

I had a lot of fun writing it; it's a subject I've been interested in for many years. There have been books about the Turk before, but they have generally been aimed at chess enthusiasts, rather than the general audience for which this book is intended. It doesn't assume any knowledge of chess, and the complexities of the game itself are actually of little importance to the story. John Gaughan, a magician based in Los Angeles, has reconstructed the Turk, and discovered much new information about its operation in the process. I visited his workshop and was very fortunate that he agreed to share some of his findings with me. The result is, I believe, the most detailed account so far of the Turk's extraordinary story.

Q: When did you first hear about the Turk?

I can't remember exactly, but it was probably when I was a teenager, and I first got interested in artificial intelligence. I had a book called The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed, which contained poems and prose written by a computer program called Racter. I spent several months working on my own software to do the same sorts of things: hold conversations, construct sentences, write poems, and so on. I also wrote programs that could make logical deductions based on simple statements and generate horoscopes. I read around the subject of machine intelligence generally, and it was probably then that I first came across the Turk.

Q: What was it about the Turk's story that particularly interested you?

What appealed to me was the way in which this automaton prompted a debate, in the late 18th century, about whether a machine could think or not. I loved the idea that people were debating the possibility of thinking machines over 150 years before the first digital computers were built. We like to think that the "artificial intelligence" debate is a modern phenomenon, but it's not. I'm rather fond of collecting examples of this kind of thing-historical precursors of modern scientific and technological breakthroughs. My first book, The Victorian Internet, looked at the parallels between the telegraph networks of the 19th century and the modern Internet. My second book, The Neptune File, was about how the planet Neptune was detected in 1845 by mathematical analysis of its effects on other bodies-which is how astronomers are now detecting planets around other stars.

Q: The Turk is a detective story as well as a book about the history of technology. How did you piece together the Turk's somewhat mysterious history?

The biggest problem was distinguishing fact from fiction. There are lots of myths and legends surrounding the Turk, many of which are routinely reported as fact. Even the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1911, my favorite snapshot of the Victorian worldview, has a completely erroneous explanation of its secret based on a story put about by the magician Robert-Houdin in the 19th century. Wolfgang von Kempelen, the Turk's creator, is almost universally referred to as a baron, but he wasn't one. This kind of thing happens repeatedly, so I had to go back to the original reports and work through them in chronological order to see what could be trusted. It was then possible to see mistakes and fabrications propagate from one account to another. I went back to old journals and sources in English, French, and German, and communicated with a researcher in Budapest, who translated excerpts from Hungarian sources into German for me. I also visited the Library Company of Philadelphia, which has a huge archive of Turk-related material. And I talked to the members of what I call the "Turk mafia"-a group of magicians, chess experts and academics, most of whom communicate with each other, and all of whom are passionately interested in the Turk and its story. I've even ended up bidding against members of the Turk mafia when Turk-related items come up for sale on eBay.

Q: Why were so many people prepared to believe that the Turk was genuine?

There seem to have been a number of reasons. The Turk's first visit to Paris, for example, coincided with the first public demonstration of a hot-air balloon by the Montgolfier brothers. If flying machines, which were supposedly impossible, could in fact be built, then why not a thinking machine? Mechanical technology was advancing quickly, the industrial revolution was getting started, and displays of mechanical toys of amazing complexity were very popular. The way in which the Turk was presented made a big difference too. John Gaughan, a Los Angeles magician, has reconstructed the Turk. And when you see it playing, even if you know the secret, it's really convincing. It seems to tap into a really fundamental human compulsion to believe that it's real.

Q: Do you believe a "thinking machine" will be possible any time soon?

It all depends how you define "thinking". I go along with Alan Turing, the great British mathematician, who sidestepped this philosophical question with his "Turing test": he defined a thinking machine as one that can convince someone that it is a human in a written question-and-answer session. In other words, for practical purposes, a machine that appears to be intelligent - that can answer questions, or drive a car in response to spoken directions, or whatever - is as good as a machine that is "really" intelligent. The philosophers can go off and argue about whether or not it's really thinking, or has a mind, or whatever, but from an engineering point of view it's what the machine can do that counts. I expect we'll see machines like this in the next few years: speech-driven PCs, personal assistants, that sort of thing. They will appear to be thinking. Will they be HAL-like artificial minds? No. But they'll still be useful.

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