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Wired 10.03: Monster in a Box

“The Turk” was a automaton chess-player introduced by Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1769. It was also a hoax. Kottke points us to a Wired story by Tom Standage, author of a book on the “machine.” The condensation is a great overview of the particular affair, and trends in clockwork and mechanicals of the time:

Kempelen was familiar with Vaucanson’s work and shared his interest in building machines that could imitate human faculties. (In addition to creating the Turk, Kempelen spent many years researching the mechanism of speech, and in the 1770s he produced the first speech synthesizers capable of articulating entire sentences.) He must have been aware that most observers found Vaucanson’s constructions incomprehensibly complicated. With the introduction of the steam engine and the power loom across Europe, there seemed to be no limit to the potential of mechanical technology. The Turk cleverly exploited this perception.

The Turk inspired a movie more than a century later, and other automatons.