Poe and the Mechanical Turk: 7 Facts About "Maelzel's Chess-Player"
In April 1836 the Southern Literary Messenger printed "Maelzel's Chess-Player," Edgar Allan Poe's argument that a famous chess-playing automaton hid a human player. Poe was right about the man. He was wrong about where the man sat, and wrong that a true machine would never lose.
The automaton was the Turk, built for the Habsburg court around 1770 and destroyed by fire in Philadelphia in 1854.
1. The Turk Was Already 66 Years Old When Poe Saw It
Wolfgang von Kempelen built the machine in 1769 to impress Empress Maria Theresa and first showed it at her court in Vienna in the spring of 1770. A turbaned figure sat behind a wooden cabinet with a chessboard on top. Before each game the exhibitor opened the cabinet doors to show the clockwork inside. The Turk played Benjamin Franklin in Paris in 1783.
Kempelen died in 1804, and the showman Johann Nepomuk Maelzel bought the Turk from his son. It played Napoleon at Schönbrunn in 1809, though accounts of that game contradict each other. Maelzel opened in New York in 1826 and toured American cities for years.
2. Poe Watched It Perform in Richmond
Maelzel exhibited in Richmond in December 1835 and January 1836. Poe had done nearly all the editorial work of the Southern Literary Messenger since the December 1835 issue, according to his biographer Arthur Hobson Quinn. On page 319 the essay prints a woodcut of the Turk, which Poe calls "a tolerable representation of the figure as seen by the citizens of Richmond a few weeks ago." The essay ran in volume 2 of the magazine, pages 318 to 326.
He recorded what he saw closely: six candles of unequal height on the cabinet, the order in which Maelzel opened the doors, and a motion of the Turk's shoulder before each move of its arm.
3. Poe Compared the Turk to Babbage's Calculating Machine
Poe wrote that Charles Babbage's calculating machine could compute "astronomical and navigation tables," a phrase he took from the Scottish scientist David Brewster. Poe argued that chess is a different problem. Arithmetic moves by fixed steps from its data. A chess move depends on what the opponent chooses to do.
He drew his conclusion from that difference: "It is quite certain that the operations of the Automaton are regulated by mind, and by nothing else."
4. He Listed 17 Clues, and the Best One Was a Missing Man
Poe numbered 17 observations. The Turk moved at irregular intervals. To Poe's ear, the key Maelzel turned before each game drove no weight, no spring, and no machinery at all. Asked if the Turk was a pure machine, Maelzel always answered that he "will say nothing about it."
The strongest clue was a person. William Schlumberger traveled with Maelzel and was never seen during a performance. When Schlumberger fell ill during an earlier Richmond visit in 1834, the Chess-Player did not play. Schlumberger, a chess player from Alsace, was in fact the Turk's main operator in America.
5. Much of Poe's Case Was Borrowed
Poe drew heavily on Brewster's Letters on Natural Magic (1832). W. K. Wimsatt Jr. traced the borrowing point by point in 1939. Poe also discusses an anonymous Baltimore essay on the automaton. He grants that its results are "in the main, just" and rejects its account of the mechanics.
In June 1827 the Baltimore Federal Gazette reported that two youths had seen a concealed man climb out of the cabinet. George Allen told the story in 1859 and identified the man as Schlumberger. It is unclear if Poe had read those reports. A French magazine, Le Magasin pittoresque, had printed the secret in 1834, two years before Poe's essay.
6. Poe Put the Hidden Man in the Wrong Place
In Poe's reconstruction the man starts behind the machinery, then rises into the body of the Turk. He watches the board through gauze in the figure's chest and works its arm with his right hand. That, Poe argued, is why the Turk plays left-handed.
The fullest account of the real method appeared unsigned in The Chess Monthly in 1857. The magazine's index credits Silas Weir Mitchell, who took the mechanical details from his father. The operator stayed inside the cabinet on a sliding seat and moved from one compartment to the other while the doors were shown. Each chess piece held a magnet, and an iron disc under each square swung up or dropped to show him the moves. He kept his own game on a pegged board and worked the Turk's arm with a pantograph lever, by the light of a hidden lamp.
Poe's logic failed on one more point. A pure machine, he wrote, "would always win." Chess computers lost to strong human players for decades before IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997.
7. The Turk Burned in 1854, and Its Owner's Son Published the Secret
Schlumberger died of yellow fever in Havana in early 1838, probably in February. Maelzel died at sea that July on the voyage home. At auction in Philadelphia on September 14, 1838, Maelzel's creditor John F. Ohl bought the Turk in for $400. In 1840 Dr. John Kearsley Mitchell took it for the same sum, paid by a club of about 75 subscribers, and restored it himself that summer. Mitchell was also a friend of the Poe family and their physician during their Philadelphia years, according to The Poe Log.
On July 5, 1854, a fire that began at the National Theatre spread to the Chinese Museum, where the Turk was stored, and destroyed it. Mitchell's son Silas wrote the account that explained how it had worked.
Did the Essay Lead to Poe's Detective Stories?
Joseph Wood Krutch argued in 1926 that the essay shows Poe working out the analytic method of his later tales. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" followed in April 1841. Henry Ridgely Evans, a historian of stage magic, judged in 1938 that Poe had practically solved the secret, apart from some mechanical details.
The magician John Gaughan finished a working reconstruction in 1989. Poe's full essay is free to read at the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. Read his 17 points beside Mitchell's account and score them.
Prophet, Bird or Devil, a novel by Nathaniel Free, turns Poe's method of analysis on the mystery of his own death.
What Were the Turk's Last Words?
Maelzel had added a device that made the Turk speak. It said one word, "Échec," French for "check," when it attacked an opponent's king.
Silas Weir Mitchell wrote that he pushed into the burning museum and found the staircase to the Turk closed off by smoke and flame. He believed he heard, through the fire, "the last words of our departed friend, the sternly whispered, oft repeated syllables." He allowed that the sound might have been the crackling woodwork. Later retellings of the Turk crying out as it burned all go back to that sentence.
"Échec! Échec!"
Sources
Edgar Allan Poe, "Maelzel's Chess-Player," Southern Literary Messenger, April 1836, pp. 318-326.
Page scans of the April 1836 Southern Literary Messenger, Internet Archive.
Silas Weir Mitchell, "The Last of a Veteran Chess Player," The Chess Monthly, January and February 1857.
W. K. Wimsatt Jr., "Poe and the Chess Automaton," American Literature, May 1939.
Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1941), chapter 10.
Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, The Poe Log (1987), biographical notes.
Henry Ridgely Evans, "Edgar Allan Poe and Magic," The Linking Ring, September 1938.
Joseph Wood Krutch, Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (Knopf, 1926).
Tom Standage, The Turk (Walker, 2002).
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