[playful page: a toy, not a measurement or an exhibit]

he Turk's showmen opened its cabinet one door at a time, and the audience saw what they were meant to. This cabinet has nothing hidden in it: each drawer holds one fact we could check, with its source. Open them in any order.

(Without JavaScript every drawer is already open.)

[ drawer: 1770 ]
Wolfgang von Kempelen builds the chess automaton to impress the Empress Maria Theresa at the Habsburg court (Standage, 2002).

[ drawer: the doors ]
Before play, the cabinet's doors were opened in turn to show machinery inside; the hidden player shifted position as they were opened (Standage, 2002).

[ drawer: 1819 ]
Standage recounts that Charles Babbage played the Turk in London in 1819, and lost.

[ drawer: 1821 ]
Robert Willis argues from the cabinet's dimensions that a person could hide inside.

[ drawer: after Kempelen ]
Kempelen died in 1804; Johann Nepomuk Maelzel acquired the Turk and toured it, reaching the United States in 1826 (Standage, 2002).

[ drawer: 1836 ]
Edgar Allan Poe publishes "Maelzel's Chess-Player". His conclusion, a person inside, was right; Standage notes that several of his arguments were not.

[ drawer: 1854 ]
After years in a Philadelphia museum, the Turk is destroyed in a fire (Standage, 2002).

[ drawer: 2005 ]
A crowd-work service is launched under the name "Mechanical Turk", for tasks people can do and software cannot.

Back to the Turk, or on to machines that answer.

Sources

1. Standage (2002). The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine. New York: Walker.
2. Willis (1821). An Attempt to Analyse the Automaton Chess Player of Mr. de Kempelen. London: J. Booth.
3. Poe (1836). Maelzel's Chess-Player. Southern Literary Messenger, April 1836.