#CHESS AUTOMATON SERIES#

Known as the “Turk,” it had been originally built in Vienna in 1769 by Baron Wolfgang Von Kempelen, a brilliant mechanician employed by the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa.įor 84 years, the Turk toured Europe and the Americas, amazing onlookers and winning most of its games.

The device consisted of a life-sized model of a human head and torso, with a black beard and grey eyes, and dressed in Ottoman robes and a turban. Perhaps the most unique object to attract Mitchell’s curiosity was the famed Automaton Chess Machine, which he painstakingly reconstructed during the summer of 1840. Mitchell was something of a polymath, with a mind eminently poetical and susceptible of the beautiful. Many a student has he helped from his own purse, and none the wiser.” Many a poor young fellow, struggling in the vortex of a great city’s temptation, has he sustained by his wise counsel and kindly sympathy. In sickness and trouble, they turned to him, and never sought his aid in vain. In an 1880 address before the Alumni Association, which was dedicated to the memory of the “Famous Faculty of 1841,” John Hill Brinton, MD 1852, spoke of Mitchell’s devotion to the students. Their lectures attracted not only large numbers of aspiring medical students, but many practicing physicians as well. Gross, the “Emperor of Surgery”-quickly established itself as one of the best faculties in the nation. This group-which boasted the likes of Thomas Dent Mütter, the famed collector of medical artifacts, Robley Dunglison, the “Father of American Physiology,” and later, Samuel D. He failed, but afterward published an obituary of the Automaton that revealed the secret of its incredible chess prowess.įrom 1841 to 1858, John Kearsley Mitchell served as professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Jefferson, part of the school’s then seven-man faculty. Mitchell’s son, himself a Jefferson alumnus, attempted to rescue the Turk from the flames. Mitchell painstakingly reassembled it and had it displayed in a nearby museum. Unfortunately, the machine was in pieces. When Mitchell bought it, the Automaton’s creator had just died in town, and the “Turk” had been seized to settle debts.

Walking Machines inc.Back in the mid-19th Century, a Jefferson professor named John Kearsley Mitchell purchased a world-famous Automaton known as the “Turk.” The Automaton-an aloof, turbaned figure-toured far and wide, playing chess, defeating all comers, and baffling audiences (including one Edgar Allan Poe).

Posted in Not Quite Robots, Pseudo Automatons and Robots, Teleoperators Tagged 1770, Faux Automata, Johann Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen de PÃ¡zmÃ¡nd, Kempelen Farkas, Master-Slave Manipulator, Pseudo Automaton, Teleoperator, The Turk, Wolfgang von Kempelen The slave-component of the manipulator, being the Turk's left arm. Here are its modern day interpretation and realization. Heinz Nixdorf Museum recently built a replica.

It has some wonderful engravings showing his interpretation of how the manipulator worked.

#CHESS AUTOMATON SERIES#

Over the next 5 years he built a series of models and eventually wrote a book, its title translated as 'The chess-player of Mr. Racknitz had seen the Turk's performance in Dresden of 1784. The manipulator needed at least 4 degrees-of-freedom – arm left and right, arm forward and back, arm raised and lowered, and the hand with an opening/closing grip. Never-the-less, after considering all of that, I still consider the Turk as the first master-slave manipulator based on anthropomorphic terms. With all the Turk's operators having kept quite on the detail, and the Turk being destroyed in a fire, all we can do is base our finding on our interpretations of those earlier attempts, and also in re-construction attempts (by John Gaughan in America and the Heinz Nixdorf Computer Museum in Germany). The question is how? There have been various attempts to guess at, described based on personal observation, or the re-invention of the machine. From our interest here, it is certainly true that the Turk's arm was mechanically operated. Although believed to be a trick very early on, there has and still is much conjecture around how it actually worked. Well established as a fake contrivance, The Turk was presented as a clockwork machine that played chess. There is significant other matter on 'The Turk' published elsewhere already.

Like my post on Maskelyne's ' Psycho' and ' Zoe' automatons, the interest here is its place in history in terms of remote master-slave manipulators, and I shall confine myself to just that.

Chess automaton