If you remember von Kempelen's version of the performance, you'll see now why his long-winded descriptive patter was so important.

By this time in its history, Maelzel used fewer props, kept the automaton behind a velvet rope and no longer allowed a close inspection of the interior -- he merely showed the cabinet as a modern stage magician would. This not only made the performance faster to keep up with the audience's shrinking attention spans, but also required more agility on the part of the director.

I admit I've made Maelzel's cabin rather roomy for a first-class cabin on a packet ship, but I did have to fit the automaton in somewhere. As you'll see, though, even this tiny space was far preferable to the accommodations in steerage.

Normally, the automaton would stand a few inches off the floor, but here Maelzel has assembled it without its casters, to keep it from sliding around too much with the motion of the ship.

Packet ships were vessels that made frequent, scheduled trips back and forth across the Atlantic, usually carrying mail and passengers.

As the conversation suggests, Eugène de Beauharnais died in 1824 -- but his family still held Maelzel to their financial arrangement.

In the first panel, Constance is using a powder measure and flask to fill the smoke pots in the Conflagration of Moscow.

Maelzel is working on one of his "funambulists" -- a pair of rope-dancing dolls he added to the touring exhibition somewhere during his European tours. It's unknown whether he built them himself or purchased them from another inventor.

It's true: von Kempelen's box was nothing more than a clever distraction technique.

Though Babbage wasn't fooled by Maelzel's show, he did believe that it was possible to build a machine capable of playing games of skill, including chess.

Babbage's dislike of music in general, and street musicians in specific, is well (and hilariously) documented in Sydney Padua's lovely webcomic 2-D Goggles.

The text on this page comes from Babbage's own notes, found inside his copy of Windisch's book.

In the three years since the last scene, Maelzel toured his mechanical menagerie through Paris, London, Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh, and eventually back to London.

Though 15% interest seems normal to anyone with a credit card, in the 19th century, it would've been considered fairly high. In real terms, it meant that Maelzel had to clear 4500 francs per month -- no small amount -- just to keep up with the interest.

After his stepfather's final exile to the island of St. Helena, Eugène de Beauharnais became the Duke of Leuchtenberg and resided in Munich.

True to his statement, de Beuharnais did lead the remains of Napoleon's army back from Moscow after Murat defected, and his leadership was credited with keeping the horrendous conditions of the retreat from becoming even worse.

By this point, Beethoven was almost entirely deaf, and used conversation books as a means of communication. Some of them still survive, though many have been lost or destroyed.

Maelzel and Beethoven did finally make up, each paying half the legal expenses. Though he was at first skeptical of the instrument, calling it "silly stuff", he did eventually see the utility of the metronome, and used its tempos in his later works.

(Incidentally, I'm hardly a Beethoven scholar, so if anyone reading this sees any holes in my historical research, please feel free to contact me with corrections.)

Nannette Streicher, whom we last saw here in her Piano factory, was a close friend of Beethoven's.

The gentleman on his way out is Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel, and he did invent the first real metronome.

The history surrounding this incident was rather more complicated than I'm portraying here: Maelzel and Beethoven originally planned to take the Panharmonicon on tour to London, but their legal fight sent Maelzel out on his own to keep ahead of Beethoven's lawyers, first to Munich, then Amsterdam. The legal fight was messy, and only Beethoven's side of the argument still exists. (Beethoven did repay the fifty ducats Maelzel loaned him, as soon as the fight began.)

It's worth noting that both the composer Moscheles and one of the Stein family (the owners of the piano factory) sided with Maelzel.

Here's a nice recording of Wellington's Sieg, in its orchestral setting. As far as I can tell, there are no existing recordings of its setting for the Panharmonicon.

"Ta ta lieber lieber Maelzel" -- there's a longstanding story that Beethoven made this "musical joke" first into a lighthearted little canon, (Canon WoO 162, aka the Mälzelkanon), and then into the second movement of his Eighth Symphony. Unfortunately, the story's been debunked, and the canon attributed to Anton Schindler, but the idea of it, as an example of banter between Maelzel and Beethoven, is something I thought represented their often-antagonistic relationship well.

In reality, the Panharmonicon was probably much bigger than this, but I had to keep the design down to something I could draw more than once. For an idea of what it might have sounded like, here's a video of a more advanced Orchestrion from 1908.

The music is the second movement from Haydn's Military Symphony (Allegrretto, Symphony #100). Haydn was once his teacher, and was also one of the few composers Beethoven respected.

Maelzel's original design for the metronome is described as "a lever, striking upon a little anvil", but I couldn't find any actual images of it, so I did my best with the design.

Maelzel created a number of ear-trumpets for Beethoven, some of which still exist, and may be seen at the Beethoven Museum in Bonn.

The Conflagration of Moscow was an enormous mechanical diorama that Maelzel created to celebrate Napoleon's Pyrrhic victory in 1812.

The woman in the last panel, Nannette Streicher, along with her husband, is the owner of the piano factory where Maelzel is renting shop his space. It's said that Beethoven favored their pianos, even going so far as to help sell them.

Maelzel's mechanical trumpeter has been lost to time, but a similar automaton built around the same time by Friedrich Kaufmann still exists.

Remember how much Maelzel paid for it?

This is Napoleon's stepson Eugène de Beauharnais, son of Josèphine de Beauharnais and her late husband Alexandre.

I based my retelling of this scene on the account written by Louis Constant Wairy in his book Recollections of the Private Life of Napoleon.

Marshall Berthier is referring to the Siege of Acre, where the Ottoman Empire put an end to Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and Syria. Putting an Ottoman opponent before the Emperor while in the conquered city of Vienna was indeed a risky move on Maelzel's part.

It seems that Maelzel did try to pass the automaton off as his own invention, at least on a few occasions.

The General seated at the table is Louis Alexandre Berthier, and Napoleon's manservant is Louis Constant Wairy, whose portrait you can see here.

As I mentioned earlier, Dr. bin Ibrahim's character is based on a real person -- including his medicines. The inspiration for this scene came from the fact that an editor thought that Ben Ali was an American, using a fake Turkish identity:

"In the meantime, however, Americans continued to be fasci-nated by the remote. While excitement was high over the depreda-tions of the Barbary pirates, Ibraham Adam Ben Ali, a Turk or (as an editor thought more likely) "some crafty native, who has assumed a Turkish name" went about selling the Incomparable Algerine Medicine for the scurvy."

Because there's so much detail in this page, I've made a larger version.

This gentleman in the work apron is Dr. John Kearsley Mitchell, whom Mrs. bin Ibrahim mentioned back on page 5.

We know that Kempelen's gravestone bore a quote from Horace, "I do not die completely," but its design is a guess, because it no longer exists. You can still visit his grave, but you'll have to look for him under your boot-soles -- he was buried in the Währing cemetary, but in 1925, it was converted into Schubert Park. (Beethoven and Schubert were both originally interred in the Währinger Friedhof, but were moved to the Zentralfriedhof, their original tombs preserved.) So if you're ever in Vienna, take a walk through Schubert Park, and say hello to him for me.

Did Maelzel know the automaton was a trick? My guess is that he did, but I've no conclusive proof one way or the other. By 1806, he had built several of his own very impressive automata -- including a statue of a boy that actually played the trumpet, its fingers, lips, and breath all driven by the same studded drum -- so he surely knew the limits of technology at the time. Additionally, von Kempelen always made it a point to let the audience know that the chess-player was a trick, referring to it as a "trifle" and a "bagatelle". I have to think that poor Wolf felt rather bewildered when people kept taking it so seriously.

Von Kempelen took the secret with him to his grave; we don't even know the names of the directors he hired for either of the automaton's tours. It may seem odd that Karl wouldn't know the particulars of the trick, but from his perspective, the automaton must have been an awful nuisance. It dragged him all over Europe, and for he and Theresia, it would've been one boring apartment after another, never seeing the performances, never getting a chance to participate in the fun. It's not hard to imagine Karl never wanting anything to do with it.

**

For those of you new to Clockwork Game, this marks the last of the original run of pages. Starting next Thursday, the story will update one page per week.

Karl has redecorated his father's study to fit his Neoclassic taste. As dedicated a court politician as Wolf was, he probably wouldn't have owned much artwork that sympathized so heavily with the French Revolution, but by 1806, Napoleon had defeated the Austrians at Ulm and occupied Vienna, and the Holy Roman Empire was only three months away from dissolution, so Karl's choice of decor reflects more than just the changes of his home life -- it's probably a political move as well.

One bit of trivia in regards to the house itself -- the von Kempelens actually had at least two other residences in addition to the house in Pressburg. They rented a set of apartments in Vienna, which is where Wolf actually died; they also inherited a farm in Gomba-Hubice from Wolf's family, where Wolf spent most of his retirement. Rather than depict all three residences and ask readers to keep them straight, I squashed them all together and used the Pressburg house, with Wolf's primary workshop and study, to represent them all.

I'm also squashing history as well-- Maelzel didn't actually become Court Mechanician until 1808 or 1809, but the effect's the same.

None of my sources give a cause of death for von Kempelen, so I purposely left it ambiguous.

How much is twenty thousand francs worth after more than two hundred years? For the sake of the exercise, I tried some rough calculations on the Measuring Worth site and came up with a figure somewhere between two and ten million dollars (depending on which metrics you want to use), so the answer is: a lot. Certainly much more than an organ-builder's son could manage.

Maelzel and Wolf's elder brother are both named after a national saint of the Czech Republic, John of Nepomuk.

I've squashed history a bit, here: Count Cobenzl did offer von Kempelen a teaching position at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, but not until 1801; von Kempelen declined on grounds of ill health, so I didn't think it too presumptuous to advance his illness a bit.

Also, I know I've got them shaking hands left-handed; it's less a mistake and more to imply that Wolf can't let go his cane easily.

The current Emperor is Francis II, von Kempelen's fifth head of state since arriving at court in 1755, and the last ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. I took the inspiration for this investiture ceremony from the proceedings at Buckingham Palace, because I couldn't find any reference for how they did it in Vienna, way back when.

The gentleman approaching them is Count Cobenzl from the automaton's first game.

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 teenaged Bell 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.

The concept that von Kempelen might enclose his speaking maching inside a mannequin -- and his tendency to cover the machine with a sheet -- is taken from Windisch's book.

The speaking machine was also not Kempelen's first attempt to create an aid for persons with disabilities; ten years earlier he created a typewriter for a young blind composer, so that she could correspond more easily.

The thing I find most fascinating about von Kempelen -- and what drew me to tell his story, even in the light of his chess automaton's unfortunate Orientalist overtones -- is that he was a true gentleman scientist, and from all accounts that I've read, was genuinely devoted to bettering humanity with both his official work and his inventions. I can only imagine how much it must've burned him that the automaton was so much better received than his other, more worthwhile creations. He was also one of the last great Natural Philosophers, following in the footsteps of Newton and Leibniz, and succeeded by Goethe.

In fact, in the original draft of the script, this scene -- with its discussion of art and its relationship to science -- was supposed to take place between von Kempelen and Goethe. Goethe did, in fact, see the speaking machine demonstrated; he wrote to his patron that it "is not very loquacious, but it can pronounce certain childish words nicely." Unfortunately, further research turned up that Goethe never traveled to Vienna, let alone Pressburg, so it's much more likely that he was one of the thousands of anonymous viewers who filed past it during the 1783–84 tour. This meant that I had to dig up another character for the conversation. Hence, Jozsef -- and the change was much for the better.

The model you see here is actually von Kempelen's third attempt at building a speech synthesizer. As Joseph mentions, the first wasn't much more than a bagpipe reed and a kitchen bellows, and the second was more like an organ, with an individual pipe and key for each phoneme. The third design was an attempt to more closely emulate the human mouth, nose and throat, and was one of the first machines to successfully do so.

However rude it may appear on first glance, this final design is incredibly clever; you can see how it works in this interactive flash site from the Kempelen Farkas Speech Research Laboratory in Budapest. The Institute of Media Archeology in Austria also has their own replica, and their site offers sound and video clips. Here's one more replica for good measure.

Von Kempelen usually made it pronounce words and short phrases in Latin, Italian, or French rather than German, because the machine had difficulty with harsh consonants. Despite twenty years of work and continual adjustments to improve its inflection and pitch control, its voice remained very crude (and rather creepy). Still, it was an amazing effort for one man, and von Kempelen's contributions to the field are still noted today.

Speech simulation has taken quite a different turn these days -- scientists have largely given up on replicating human speech through physical means because it's just too difficult. Instead, research facilities have turned to creating huge libraries of individual sounds in sentence context.

The original speaking machine still exists, and can be viewed by the public in the Musical Instruments section of the The Deutsches Museum in Munich.

Here's young Theresia, all grown up. She was, in fact, twenty-nine years old and still unmarried in 1797. Whether or not she was checking her father's work is my own speculation (von Kempelen did, however, invent a tobacco-cutting machine in 1798).

Joszef's character is another one I had to invent out of whole cloth. All I had was his name; I could find no other information about him whatsoever.

This image, which I linked to last week, is the frontispiece to Kempelen's book on speech mechanics. It's reproduced on several websites and in books as being a portrait of Kempelen himself, and each time I've seen it without the inscription, which reads "Ignatius A. Born -- Naturae amico et suo -- Auctor". Roughly translated, this means "Ignatius A. Born -- To nature's friend and his own -- Author."

It's a dedication, not an author portrait; von Kempelen is dedicating the book to his friend Ignác von Born, the metallurgist for whom the mineral Bornite is named. Von Born died the same year that the book was published, so it's probably a memorial. Besides, when you compare von Born's likeness to von Kempelen's self-portrait, the two didn't look all that much alike.

When designing my own view of von Kempelen, I tried to stick pretty close to the self-portrait, but I confess I was also swayed by this handsome, evocative bust by sculptor Béla S. Hegyi. There are a couple other sculptures of von Kempelen, one at the
Farkas Kempelen General School in Heves, and another by sculptor Marton László, fittingly displayed in the Várszínház (Castle Theatre) in Budapest. His image also appears on commemorative medals, postage stamps and coins.

Panel 1: The Castle Theatre still stands today, and is currently the home of Budapest's National Dance Theatre. Also, by this time, von Kempelen had seen two of his own plays, The Magic Book (1767) and Perseus and Andromeda (1781) performed in Pressburg and Vienna, respectively.

Panel 2: Joseph II granted von Kempelen a privilege on his "steam and fire engines," which were used to drive mills and other machinery.

Panel 3: von Kempelen's book on the synthesis of human speech, published in both German and French, is considered his masterwork, and collects twenty-two years of his research into phonetics, speech formation, and the construction of his speaking machine -- more on that subject in a couple of pages.

Home again, after nearly three solid years on the road.

Remember Gyorgy, last seen eleven years ago in narrative time? He's Anthon's bigger, stronger cousin.

Here's another minor deviation from history: the automaton was actually stored at Schönbrunn Palace, not at von Kempelen's home.

Panel 1: The automaton became so successful that von Kempelen had to move to larger exhibition space in London (actually, that's where Thicknesse saw it perform; I fudged history a bit here). There were several other stops on the tour between London and Leipzig as well, including Carlsruhe, Frankfurt and Gotha.

Panel 2:The Leipzig Trade Fair, or Leipziger Messe, still takes place today, as it has for nearly a thousand years. There are some really gorgeous old images of the city in Wikimedia Commons, including this one, which I wanted to use, but couldn't find a way to get both von Kempelen and Anthon into view and still show all that detail. I also think it's highly unlikely that they'd be exhibiting the automaton outdoors.

The device displayed by von Kempelen is his speaking machine, which he usually exhibited side-by-side with the automaton (Johann Jacob Ebert called them "the two most remarkable curiosities of the last Michaelmas Fair.") You can get a better look at it in last week's page, sitting next to him on the desk as he reads Thicknesse's pamphlet.

Panel 3: Anthon knows too well that the glamorous roadtrip is almost over, and that when he gets back to Pressburg, the most exciting thing he has to look forward to is lining up the silverware at dinnertime.

Panel 4: This is the last time we'll see the automaton outside of its packing crates until the next chapter. Shame that it goes to its temporary rest with its costume all shabby and worn out.

Goodness, what an unpleasant fellow.

This is an abridged version of Thicknesse's exposé; the full-length version is full of even more bile, hyperbole, and incorrect assumptions.

(If you're looking for the essay and comments that went with the earlier version of this page, you may find them archived here.)

I love this page, because it is the 18th-century equivalent of Someone Is Wrong On The Internet. I spent two days making sure I got that printing press depicted accurately. Thanks to David MacMillan for the image refs.

(If you're looking for the essay and comments that went with the earlier version of this page, you may find them archived here.)

The apoplectic audience member is Philip Thicknesse, nicknamed "Dr. Viper". He was once the patron of Thomas Gainsborough, until a "wretched squabble" ended their friendship. Gainsborough did a splendid portrait of Thicknesse's third wife, Anne Ford, whom you can see here in the last panel. And just so you don't think I'm the only one being harsh on Thicknesse, here's a political cartoon of him, by James Gillray:

click for larger image

Hat tip to Jim Ottaviani for helping me get my hands on that image. Just goes to show that political cartooning was vicious from its very start.

There's a bit of a name flip at work here; Anna's given name was "Maria Anna", but she was also known as "Anna Maria." Theresia's given name was "Maria Theresia", but she was also called by her middle name. Also, the Hungarian version of von Kempelen's name was "Farkas", which translates to "Wolf". I was originally going to have Anna call him "Farkas," but it doesn't have a very friendly sound to my ear. So "Wolf" it was.

Theresa's involvement in this scene stems from the then-rampant speculation about a child acting as the driving force inside the automaton. Karl would've been a bit young to play against Paris' greatest chess masters, but a small, clever girl of fifteen with a chess obsession? Totally plausible.

I pretty much had to guess about the inner workings of the automaton at this point -- von Kempelen surely must have made some adjustments to it to make it easier to take apart and put back together before going on the road -- so I figured there'd be a lot of threaded couplings and turnbuckle-type affairs. Well, rather, I figured on turnbuckles and couplings after my buddy Trevor called me out for drawing them as greebles.

This is what Savile Row used to look like back when it was just a bunch of upscale, newly-built houses. The waxworks that young Karl asks about were a popular London attraction at the time, similar to today's Madame Tussauds. At the time this scene took place, Mrs. Salmon's was over on Fleet Street.
A local high-school student modeled for the character of young Theresa -- I'm not sure if she wants her name up on the internets for everyone to see, but here's an anonymous hat tip to her, anyway. Thanks so much!

Philidor was indeed quoted as saying that his match against the automaton was the most exhausting of his life. Since a good percentage of the strategy behind champion-level chess is figuring out your opponent's behavior patterns and expressions, playing a giant, wooden-faced puppet must've been extremely difficult.

The quotation at the bottom of the page comes from the September 1783 edition of The Journal des Savants, the earliest scientific journal published in Europe.

Some accounts of this match claim that Philidor actually intended to lose, but worked so hard at making it seem like an intentional loss that he wound up having to win to avoid looking like he was pointedly losing.

This game took place in front of members of the Académie des Sciences -- but there are conflicting reports as to whether it took place at the Académie, or if there were just representatives from the Académie present for the game. Anyway, that's what the note-taking guys with the little badges are supposed to represent. They were trying to figure out how it worked... and couldn't.

According to Bradley Ewart, Philidor was even more benevolent than I portray him here:

Philidor, with his usual benevolence and lack of vanity, replied, "Sir, I would be glad to do it."

Then, after a moment's reflection, he added, "But you must admit that, in your own interest, we must not appear to conspire. I must defend myself and it must not seem that I am demonstrating any negligence, but I shall do all I can, I promise you, to be beaten by your automaton."

Other historians portray Philidor's actions closer to my own version, but either way, the end result's really the same.

I found this nice page of Franklin chess trivia, which includes this great anecdote:

Another time, Franklin was playing chess with the elderly Duchess of Bourbon, who made a move that exposed her king. Franklin then proceeded to capture the king. The duchess, knowing the proper rules to chess, said, "we do not take Kings so." Franklin responded, "We do in America." This anecdote was first told by Thomas Jefferson in his memoirs.

Again, there's a bit of artistic license at play here: It was reported by Franklin's grandson Temple (who accompanied him in Paris as his secretary) that Franklin did enjoy the game, and he even had a pamphlet about the Automaton in his library when he died (more about that pamphlet in a few pages; it wasn't yet written at the time this scene takes place). So then -- why did I have Franklin storm out at the end of the game? Well, Franklin had a reputation as a sore loser, and his behavior frequently departed from his own "Poor Richard" moralizing. Having him leave in a huff seemed a better way to encapsulate his personality, though it's probably not entirely true to history.

The overlay text in this week's page is taken directly from Franklin's Morals of Chess. I've heavily edited it down for space, but I don't think I've lost any of the meaning. Chess experts and historians, however, are welcome to quibble this point; input is always good.

This scene constitutes some of the first real conjecture of the script; it's pretty well established that Franklin played the automaton, but the outcome of the match is unknown. Some historians have speculated that the best evidence for Franklin having lost the game is that he didn't publish any letters or pamphlets about his victory.

I also find it incredibly sweet that von Kempelen is such a fanboy around Franklin. It certainly would have been difficult not to be; Franklin was a total science rockstar at the time.

• Franklin's cane and suit are drawn from surviving examples, thanks to the fact that the Smithsonian has photographs of them online.
• Despite the fact that it's summertime in Paris, Franklin is still wearing his trademark marten-fur hat (I always assumed it was beaver until I read Walter Isaacson's biography of Franklin). He apparently wore it regardless of weather or season, and it quickly became the height of French fashion -- ladies wore their hair gathered up into similar hats "a la Franklin".
• "Your odometer" -- one of Franklin's many inventions was this carriage-wheel odometer, which did indeed employ cogs and gears, but was nowhere near as (apparently) complex as the inner workings of Kempelen's famous automaton.
• Franklin's obsession with chess was well-known; he sometimes played till dawn, put off important messages until a game was finished, and once played against a mutual friend in Madame de Brillion's chambers -- while the lady soaked in her bathtub and looked on.
• "Monsieur de Kempelen" -- early in the story, I decided not to bother using pointy brackets (< >) to distinguish when characters were speaking one language or another, hoping that locations and appellations would be enough to suggest the current language to the reader. While von Kempelen could speak French to a certain degree, Franklin had only a rough (and often self-invented) command of the language, so I decided for the sake of the story to do away with the stumblings and grammatical errors that must certainly have occurred during their conversations.
• "Wrote a pamphlet" -- this would be The Morals of Chess, an essay that Franklin started some thirty years before, and finally got around to publishing at his press at Passy in 1780.

This scene takes place in the Café de la Régence, the premier chess club in Paris, and by extension, the world. "André" is André Danican Philidor, who in addition to being the top-ranked chess player on the continent, was also a very famous composer -- though by this time he had retired from his musical career to focus more intently on chess.

I'm compressing time a little here; in June of 1783, Philidor was visiting London, but this lets me introduce the Café as a setting early on; it's a place you'll see a few more times throughout the story.

Emperor Joseph's sister Antoine is better known as Marie Antoinette.

This scene takes place in the Mirror Room at Sch&oum;nbrunn palace, the same room where, twenty years earlier, a young prodigy had his debut before Empress Maria Theresia. The gentleman asking von Kempelen to visit his mother is the future Emperor of Russia.

Many stories about the automaton include reference to a meeting between the automaton and Catherine the Great, but as far as my research could tell it never happened. It seems that the automaton never ventured further east than Pressburg.

In this scene, we see the first evidence of von Kempelen's uneven history with the House of Habsburg-Lorraine. After Maria Theresia's death in 1780, he served under three more heads of state, none of which appreciated his genius -- or his politics -- as much as Her Majesty.

Von Kempelen accomplished rather a lot in the seven years between this page and the last (though none of it's automaton-related, because the chess-machine was disassembled in his attic): he published a book of poetry in German, helped move a University to Budapest, built a typewriter for a blind musician, and wrote a play, Perseus and Andromeda, which was presented in the National Theatre in Vienna.

Anna is actually Wolfgang's second wife; his first marriage, to a noblewoman named Francziska Piani, lasted only two months. Francziska died of a stomach obstruction, and it's said that he disappeared into his workshop for years out of grief, distracting himself by learning woodworking, clockmaking, and dozens of other skills that he would eventually use to build the automaton.

Five years after Francziska's death, he married Anna Maria Gobelius. Despite their best efforts, their first three children didn't survive infancy -- so Theresa and Karl must've been the apples of their parents' eyes.

Wigs were compulsory dress for men at this time, worn daily except during the most casual moments, so it took a while to get to the point where I could show von Kempelen au naturel. The practice of wearing wigs grew less common as the French Revolution approached: since wigs were inexorably linked to the aristocracy, as the nobles fell out of favor, so did the fashion. Anthon's hair is his own; it's hard to see in the low-res versions, but you can tell by the way his hairline is rendered.

The little gizmo on the door is supposed to be another of von Kempelen's many little inventions. Nothing like this was ever attributed to him -- I just like the idea of him outfitting his house with a bunch of neat labor-saving devices, like a counterweight to keep the front door's crossbar from slamming down noisily.

The text for this, while significantly abridged, is taken directly from The Memoirs and Correspondence (official and Familiar) of Sir Robert Murray Keith.

This is not an exaggeration; Ambassador Keith got in to see the Automaton through overpowering numbers.

Incidentally, all the Scotsmen except the Ambassador are in violation of the Dress Act -- which forbade the wearing of any tartan or traditional Scottish dress by civilians on pain of transportation -- by getting kitted out to the nines in their best highland duds. Since the Act was only really enforceable on British soil, they'd probably get away with it.

You may notice that the kilts aren't pleated. That's because pleats didn't appear in kilts until after the repeal of the dress act, sometime around 1792.

Pressburg (or more accurately, Preßburg) is the old name of modern-day Bratislava, the capitol of Slovakia. It's a few miles to the east of Vienna. The house itself is not -- as far as I know -- Kempelen's actual house, but it is based on an actual house in Bratislava.

The plans that von Kempelen has in front of him are for a mobile bed he invented and built for the Empress, who was suffering from smallpox at the time. It was essentially the precursor to a modern hospital bed -- it could be raised and lowered, and rolled from room to room, so that Her Majesty could still conduct business during her illness.

The drawing which hangs behind von Kempelen in panel 1 is actually based one of his own, which I found in this biography by Dr. Alice Reininger.

Von Kempelen must have been more informed about the Ottoman Empire than most of the Habsburg court, however, I find it likely that he was not only subject to the common prejudices of his era, but also willing to use his fellow courtiers' odd combination of fear and fascination for his own benefit.

On von Kempelen's monologue, my co-consultant Emrah Sahin comments that “von Kempelen relates the origins of Ottoman knowledge to one early period, I assume. Reference to Mongols would make sense in the context of the twelfth-century or earlier. Astronomers such as Ali Kushji, philosophers, poets, mathematicians, chemists, and other intellectuals continued to receive and give wonderful education, regardless of Mongols. In fact, a huge intellectual network existed until the nineteenth century in a vast cultural basin stretching from Anatolia through Iran and the Middle East into Turkestan. Mongols left their crushing impact upon the libraries, burning precious manuscripts, but Ottoman men of knowledge who had the means and skills stayed in business as usual. More evidently, it was along these lines: an inclusive education system that incorporated all young talents into the system lost its dynamism after an exclusive elite group emerged in the Ottoman urban centers, monopolizing knowledge and preventing outsiders, mainly poor young inquisitive minds from competing with their children in the highly hierarchical system that they themselves created to minimize mobility. Losing so much ground, I suppose, was of their making as much as of Mongols."

I also found this article on the same subject rather useful.

Panel three refers to the Battle of Vienna.

Pelletier was the French illusionist mentioned earlier, and Franz Mesmer was the "physician" from whom we get the term "Mesmerized."

Von Kempelen's shock was justified -- the allowance the empress handed him was equal to his current salary, and would be renewed every year. Or so he hoped.

Over the next several years, von Kempelen went on to complete all the tasks that the Empress set out for him -- fountains at both Schönbrunn and Pressburg Castle, a pontoon bridge across the Danube, and later, two steam engines, one of which he used to dig canals. He got a patent for them a year ahead of Watt, but lacked the money to refine his designs. This led to some rather dire consequences; Standage mentions an account stating that one of Kempelen's steam engines exploded while in use.

The Banat is a region in Central Europe that spans present-day Romania, Serbia, and Hungary. During this time, the empress assigned von Kempelen there first as director of the Transylvanian salt mines, and later as the commissioner of repopulation, where he was in charge of settling German citizens in the largely-depopulated territories taken from the Ottoman Empire in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

I don't have any concrete evidence suggesting that von Kempelen's position influenced his decision to wrap his illusion in the guise of a Turk, but I do think the conclusion seems feasible.

Regarding Maria Theresia's use of the word "heathens," the empress was a religious conservative, and was extremely intolerant of any religion other than her own Catholicism. Only after her death did her son, Emperor Joseph II, ratify edicts that allowed Protestants and Jews to practice their religions more freely.

Poor Cobenzl, beaten by a machine. He's only the first of thousands, to be sure.

For reference, here's the game I used, listed at Chessgames.com. I altered it a little bit because of the forfeited move -- it was tricky and I had to replay it about ten times to get the pacing back on track, and I also had a friend and regular chessplayer check it out for me.

Here's a little bit of automaton trivia, though not about the original -- it's about John Gaughan's replica. If you watch this video closely, you can see the genius solution Gaughan worked out to the problem of giving the automaton moving eyelids. Rather than create a secondary shroud of wood or leather for each eyeball, he carefully painted the back-half of each eyeball the same brown as the face. This gives the automaton a permanent expression of sly confidence, and also allows the appearance of a downward gaze as they rotate forward. A truly effective illusion, and a nice bit of puppetry besides.

For those of you who aren't able to follow the precise moves, suffice it to say: Cobenzl's in deep trouble. The line he delivers about his king is pure bravado; the automaton's just toying with him at this point.

The gentleman sitting next to the empress is her son, not her husband -- he's the soon-to-be Emperor Joseph II. In theory, they were co-regents, but in reality, the empress had the upper hand until her death.

The Automaton was quite impatient with slow players. It would roll its eyes, tap its hand on the cabinet, and generally do its best to intimidate its opponent.

What is inside the box? A remote control? Wires? A signaling device? Magnets? Oh, the mystery.

And for those of you getting bored with all the chess moves, don't worry; this is the only full game in the whole story. You can pretty safely skip all the technical moves and just pay attention to the characters' reactions -- you won't lose much if you do.

If the chess set looks a little odd, it's because the design that most people associate with chess, the Staunton Set, wouldn't be created 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.

A while back, The New York Times ran this neat article about John Gaughan, the man who built a working replica of The Turk, and who generously allowed me to base my own design on his version. Make sure to watch the audio slideshow where he narrates the (all too brief) tour of his shop. Hat tip to Jim O for sending me the article.

The courtier being volunteered is Count Philipp von Cobenzl, a nobleman and diplomat.