The Turk, Chess Automaton - Hardcover

Levitt, Gerald M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786407786 ISBN 13: 9780786407781

Publisher: McFarland Publishing, 2000

Synopsis

With all-new research and facts unknown for two centuries, this is a richly detailed and comprehensive account of "The Turk," Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen's amazing but fraudulent Chess Automaton that held the world spellbound more than fifty years beginning in 1770. In actuality, the Turk was manipulated by a man housed in a hot box, working by candlelight-but the secret was kept for decades. Besides playing a good game of chess within an hour's time, the manipulator had to keep track of the moves, work the pantograph arm apparatus, nod the head, roll the eyes, cover up sneezes and coughs, and work the sound mechanism. This work contains a detailed discussion of the literature surrounding the Turk along with an analysis of its hidden operation. The complete collection of published games played by the Turk, many, again, unknown for 200 years, is also included.

About this title

About the Author

Gerald M. Levitt has been playing postal and over-the-board chess for many years. He has authored numerous articles for Chess Life and Florida Chess, written a chess column, and made live radio appearances as a chess expert. A retired doctor of podiatric medicine, he lives in Naples, Florida.

From Scientific American

It was an impressive showpiece: a fierce-looking, turbaned puppet seated at a cabinet bearing a chessboard. Its successive owners from 1770 to 1854 would open the cabinet to display to an audience an array of gears and springs and then would invite a spectator to play a game of chess with the Turk, as the turbaned figure came to be known. The Turk usually won. Audiences and chess players were impressed. But it was a grand hoax. Jammed uncomfortably into the cabinet, kept from the audience's view by legerdemain, was a "director," a human chess player who observed by candlelight the moves made by the opponent and operated the pantograph that executed the Turk's responses.

EDITORS OF SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

Edition details

• Publisher: McFarland Publishing
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0786407786
• ISBN 13: 9780786407781
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 258