Maelzel's Chess Player
Encyclopedia
Essay
An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...
by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
exposing a fraudulent automaton
Automaton
An automaton is a self-operating machine. The word is sometimes used to describe a robot, more specifically an autonomous robot. An alternative spelling, now obsolete, is automation.-Etymology:...
chess
Chess
Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...
player called The Turk
The Turk
The Turk, also known as the Mechanical Turk or Automaton Chess Player , was a fake chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. From 1770 until its destruction by fire in 1854, it was exhibited by various owners as an automaton, though it was exposed in the early 1820s as an...
, which had become famous in Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
and the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and toured widely. The fake automaton was invented by Wolfgang von Kempelen
Wolfgang von Kempelen
Johann Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen de Pázmánd was a Hungarian author and inventor with Irish ancestors.-Life:...
in 1769 and was brought to the U.S. in 1825 by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel
Johann Nepomuk Mälzel
Johann Nepomuk Maelzel [or Mälzel] was an inventor, engineer, and showman, best known for manufacturing a metronome and several music automatons, and displaying a fraudulent chess machine.-Life and work:...
after von Kempelen's death.
Although it is the most famous essay on the Turk, many of Poe's hypotheses were incorrect. He also may or may not have been aware of earlier articles written in the Baltimore Gazette where two youths were reported to have seen chess player William Schlumberger
William Schlumberger
William Schlumberger was a European chess master. He is known to have taughtPierre Charles Fournier de Saint-Amant to play chess and as the operator of The Turk, a chess-playing machine which purported to be an automaton. It was Bavarian musician and showman Johann Nepomuk Mälzel who hired him to...
climbing out of the machine. He did, however, borrow heavily from David Brewster
David Brewster
Sir David Brewster KH PRSE FRS FSA FSSA MICE was a Scottish physicist, mathematician, astronomer, inventor, writer and university principal.-Early life:...
's Letters on Natural Magic. Other essays and article had been written and published prior to Poe's in Baltimore
Baltimore
Baltimore is the largest independent city in the United States and the largest city and cultural center of the US state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore...
, Philadelphia, and Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
- cities in which Poe had lived or visited before writing his essay.
Background
Poe's essay was originally published in the April 1836 issue of the Southern Literary MessengerSouthern Literary Messenger
The Southern Literary Messenger was a periodical published in Richmond, Virginia, from 1834 until June 1864. Each issue carried a subtitle of "Devoted to Every Department of Literature and the Fine Arts" or some variation and included poetry, fiction, non-fiction, reviews, and historical notes...
.
Poe's essay asserts that Maelzel's troupe of automata had made at least one previous visit to Richmond, Virginia
Richmond, Virginia
Richmond is the capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in the United States. It is an independent city and not part of any county. Richmond is the center of the Richmond Metropolitan Statistical Area and the Greater Richmond area...
"some years ago", at which time they were exhibited "in the house now occupied by M. Bossieux as a dancing academy". Yet, very oddly, Poe gives no precise date or location for his own more recent encounter with Maelzel's Chess-Player, apart from stating that it was exhibited in Richmond "a few weeks ago". No known 19th- or 20th-century biography of Poe discloses when or where in Richmond he witnessed the performance of the Automaton Chess-Player.
This mystery was solved in 2007, with the publication of "The Clockwork Horror", a short story by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre
F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre
Fergus Gwynplaine MacIntyre was a journalist, novelist, poet and illustrator, who lived in New York City and said he had lived in Scotland and Wales. MacIntyre's writings include the science-fiction novel The Woman Between the Worlds and his anthology of verse and humor pieces MacIntyre's...
inspired by Poe's essay. In researching this story, MacIntyre tracked down contemporary issues of the Richmond Enquirer, discovering several references to the then-current activities of Edgar Poe and also finding advertisements in the Enquirer establishing that Maelzel's Automata were exhibited at the City Museum in Richmond from December 15, 1835, through January 2, 1836. These dates are clearly the "few weeks ago" which Poe cites in his essay. Sometime within that nineteen-day period, it is speculated that Poe visited Richmond's museum to witness the Chess-Player.
Importance
The essay is important in that it predicts some general motifs of modern science fictionScience fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
. Poe also was beginning to create an analytic method that would eventually be used in his "tales of ratiocination", the earliest form of a detective story
Detective Story
Detective Story is a film noir which tells the story of one day in the lives of the various people who populate a police detective squad. It features Kirk Douglas, Eleanor Parker, William Bendix, Cathy O'Donnell, Lee Grant, among others. The movie was adapted by Robert Wyler and Philip Yordan...
, "The Gold-Bug
The Gold-Bug
"The Gold-Bug" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Set on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, the plot follows William Legrand, who was recently bitten by a gold-colored bug. His servant Jupiter fears him to be going insane and goes to Legrand's friend, an unnamed narrator who agrees to visit his...
" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe published in Graham's Magazine in 1841. It has been claimed as the first detective story; Poe referred to it as one of his "tales of ratiocination". Two works that share some similarities predate Poe's stories, including Das...
". This point is emphasized in that Poe did not suggest a human was operating the machine, but that a mind was.
Response at the time of its publication was strong. It elicited responses from the Norfolk Herald, Baltimore Gazette, Baltimore Patriot, United States Gazette, Charleston Courier, Winchester Virginian, and New Yorker (the last of which suggested the article's only fault was its excessive length).
Ambrose Bierce
Ambrose Bierce
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist and satirist...
's 1909 short story "Moxon's Master
Moxon's Master
"Moxon's Master" is a short story by the late 19th century American author Ambrose Bierce that speculates on the nature of life and intelligence. It describes a chess-playing robot automaton that murders its creator...
" is about a chess playing automaton.