April 17, 2008 -- By an unseen hand

Something that's terribly easy to forget -- in these days of computers approaching artificial intelligence -- is just how intimidating a machine like this would be. At the time of this scene, the industrial revolution was just barely getting underway, and it was off to a rocky start. James Watt was still perfecting his steam engine; it wouldn't enter production for another five years. Some thirty years before, a man named Vaucanson had created the first fully automatic silk loom (driven by punchcards, no less). Furious at the idea of a machine replacing skilled tradesmen, the weavers of Lyon rebelled against Vaucanson with such violence that he was forced to disguise himself as a monk and flee under cover of night.

From the standpoint of the nobility gathered at Schönbrunn Palace, this automaton -- which von Kempelen claimed could think just like a human being -- would not have been a mere amusement. A thinking machine, even one that could only play chess, constituted a breakthrough of unimaginable proportion and consequence, and especially when considering the scientific discoveries of that era such a machine must have seemed entirely plausible.

Oh, and while I'm nerding out, I might as well mention the chess set. If it looks a little odd, that's because the design that most people associate with chess, the Staunton Set, wouldn't be released for another eighty years or so. The only close-up we have of The Turk's Chess pieces is from this engraving by Racknitz, from 1789 -- and so I took my primary design from that image, but blended it slightly with the Staunton set to make the individual pieces more immediately recognizable to modern readers. Here's a great page with lots of information on early European chess sets -- it looks like The Turk's pieces were based on the "Selenus" design, given the Racknitz image.