April 30, 2009 -- I must look forward to my own legacy
It's a good thing I created Joseph out of whole cloth, because only an earnest young nerd could give Wolf this kind of a pep-talk and not get smacked.
Seriously, though -- Joseph isn't just blowing sunshine, here -- von Kempelen's creations inspired many other inventions through both their form and function. The most famous, of course, are IBM's chess computers, but here are two lesser-known stories:
After the automaton's tour through London, a former clergyman named Edmund Cartwright wrote this account of a meeting with some fellow inventors:
...in the summer of 1784, I fell in company with some gentlemen of Manchester, when the conversation turned on Arkwright's spinning machinery. One of the company observed, that as soon as Arkwright's patent expired, so many mills would be erected, and so much cotton spun, that hands never could be found to weave it. To this observation I replied that Arkwright must then set his wits to work to invent a weaving mill. This brought on a conversation on the subject, in which the Manchester gentlemen unanimously agreed that the thing was impracticable... I controverted, however, the impracticability of the thing, by remarking that there had lately been exhibited in London, an automaton figure, which played at chess. Now you will not assert, gentlemen, said I, that it is more difficult to construct a machine that shall weave, than one which shall make all the variety of moves which are required in that complicated game.
The following year, he defied the naysayers and patented the power loom.
**
About thirty years after von Kempelen's death, a British scientist named Charles Wheatstone (who also invented the concertina, but that's for another day) built a reconstruction of the speaking machine, making a few improvements along the way, and exhibited it in London.
Another twenty years after that, a young Scotsman named Alexander Graham Bell saw a demonstration of Wheatstone's machine while visiting London with his parents. Inspired by the machine's abilities, the teenager and his brother returned home and built their own version, complete with a maneuverable tongue. Though he never improved von Kempelen's design any further than his early experiments, he did go on to make a speaking machine of his own.
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I didn't know that (about Edmund Cartwright). How splendid.
One of the odd things about reading this comic is that I had heard of the chess-playing automaton in summary for decades - literally - but almost invariably as if it were a *working* automaton. This comicbook is actually the first really thorough exploration I've seen which deals with it as a deception - a trick.
To me, the part that makes the automaton so much more compelling than your run-of-the-mill hoax is that when people really *did* believe that it worked, it inspired them to new and greater heights in their own creations. The concept of the machine really was as important as its functionality -- much more important, in the case of the automaton.
There are a few other stories in this vein, but I don't want to tip my hand on them just yet.
I first 'met' the Chess Turk in Poe's descriptions of it, and this webcomic adds to other added references and makes it come to life. That von Kempelen also helped seed the idea of a speaking machine is also quite interesting to me; my blind roommate uses a 'screen reader' program that has his computer read the information on the screen to him. That the JAWS program can be traced back to an 1800s mechanised chessboard performance that included the ability of the machine to say 'check' is rather fun.