The Mechanical Turk. The Chess Machine That Fooled Europe

The machine that played chess

In 1770 Wolfgang von Kempelen, a court official in the Habsburg monarchy, built a device and first presented it at Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. It looked like a cabinet with a chessboard on top, and behind the board sat a figure of a man in a turban. The figure moved the chess pieces with its arm, and it played very well. People called it the Turk.

Over the next decades the Turk toured Europe and later America, and it beat many opponents. Audiences were amazed. A machine that could play chess seemed to mean a machine that could think.

Kempelen, though, never claimed that. Modern research into his work notes that he never claimed to have invented a genuine mechanical intelligence. He was a showman and an inventor, and he is reported to have said of the secret that when you know it, it will no longer be anything.

How it worked

The secret was a person. A skilled chess player sat hidden inside the cabinet, on a seat that slid along an iron rail. The famous demonstration, in which the showman opened the doors and drawers to prove the cabinet was empty, relied on a drawer with a false back, and on the operator shifting position so that no door ever showed him.

How the operator followed the game on the board above is a matter of dispute. Accounts differ, and we do not claim to know. What is clear is that the cabinet held a human mind, not a machine.

The Turk was destroyed by a fire in Philadelphia in 1854. Three years later the secret was set out in full by the physician and writer Silas Weir Mitchell in The Chess Monthly in 1857. His father, Dr. John Kearsley Mitchell, had been the Turk's last owner.

The legends that are not true

The surprising part is how much of what people repeat about the Turk cannot be checked. Several of the most famous stories are not supported by any source.

• Napoleon played it in 1809. The earliest account of this comes in 1857, forty eight years later, and it is second hand. It is a story that was told, not a documented event.
• Benjamin Franklin played it. No document of any kind has been found that says so.
• Edgar Allan Poe exposed it. In 1836 Poe wrote an essay called Maelzel's Chess-Player, in which he argued that a human must be hidden inside. But he reasoned from the outside, and he did not have the secret. His essay even gets the year of the invention wrong, as 1769.

That is the lesson of the Turk. The deception that lasted was never only the cabinet. It was the retelling. He never said the machine was thinking. We did.

Why it still matters

The story keeps coming back. When Amazon launched a service that hired people to do small tasks that computers could not, it named it Mechanical Turk, and its founder described the idea as artificial artificial intelligence. Amazon announced in August 2026 that the service would shut down, after 21 years.

Every time a new machine seems to think, it is worth asking who is inside the cabinet, and who is telling the story. Chess was the first place this question was asked. It will not be the last.

Watch The Mechanical Turk in motion

The same story as an animated video, with a short version.

The animated story. About six minutes. Watch on YouTube

The 50 second version. Watch on YouTube

Keep reading after The Mechanical Turk

More articles on the same ideas

• Kasparov vs Deep BlueIn 1997 a computer beat the world chess champion in a match for the first time. The games and why they mattered.
• Checkers Was SolvedIn 2007 researchers proved that perfect checkers is a draw. Here is what that means, and why people still play.
• Bobby FischerThe 13 year old who stunned America, the 1972 world champion, and the title he refused to defend.

Where this is explained further

• Chess strategy guideLearn to play the game the Turk made famous.

Sources for The Mechanical Turk

• Bikker, Mind Over Matter, the thinking and speaking machines of Wolfgang von Kempelen, PhD thesis, University of Sheffield
• Edgar Allan Poe, Maelzel's Chess-Player, Southern Literary Messenger, April 1836
• Silas Weir Mitchell, The Last of a Veteran Chess Player, The Chess Monthly, 1857
• CNBC, 25 August 2026, on the shutdown of Amazon Mechanical Turk
• Only the year of the 1854 fire is given, because the exact date is not confirmed. Names of operators are left out, because the accounts that give them were written much later.