“Échec!” (February 1960 | Volume: 11, Issue: 2)

“Échec!”

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Authors: Ernest Wittenberg

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February 1960 | Volume 11, Issue 2

On April 13, 1826, a strange-looking contrivance was wheeled into the assembly rooms of the brand-new National Hotel at 112 Broadway in New York City. It consisted ol the lifelike wooden figure of a turhancd Turk, seated before a table-high maple chest three and a half feet long by two feet deep. The figure’s right arm rested lightly beside a chessboard eighteen inches square permanently affixed to the top of the chest, and his left hand held a long-stemmed clay pipe.

The contrivance was a mechanical chess player, which, its promoter announced, woidd meet—and beat—anyone who wished to challenge it. Two enthusiastic amateurs took the challenge, and in turn the Turk soundly trounced them, triumphantly crying “Échec!” (“Check!”) while doing so. Twice a day thereafter, at noon and at 8 P.M. , the left-handed automaton repeated his performance, vanquishing every opponent who volunteered. Adult spectators packed the house and paid fifty cents—children under twelve paid twentyfive cents, but got part of it back in candy—for the privilege of watching a machine outthink a man.

At the receiving end of the cash and the distributing end of the candy was the genial and genteel exhibitor, Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, a German-born impresario, musician, and inventor of musical mechanisms, and the pirate of the instrument marketed today as the Metronome de Mälzel. The Turk and Maelzel had arrived in New York in February from Paris, a few packet boats ahead of the sheriff, along with the rest of Maelzel’s variety show of automatons, a life-sized French dragoon trumpeter, and a pair of twenty-inch wooden mannequins who danced and tumbled on a thirty-loot slack rope to Maelzel’s piano accompaniment.

Newspaper coverage was detailed and full of admiration. The Evening Post gave the show more than a column of choice space, concluding that “Nothing of a similar nature has ever been seen in this city that will bear the smallest comparison with it.” The Commercial Advertiser matched the Post hosanna for hosanna. The papers were so lull of the Turk that one of them felt compelled to apologize; its excuse was that “persons at a distance can form no idea of how much the attention ol our citizens is occupied by it.” Peale’s Museum at 258 Broadway was close enough to form an idea, however, and by May 7 it was attempting to lure some of the overflow crowd with a collection of “mechanical paradoxes and curiosities made in Philadelphia in imitation of those by Mr. Maelzel.”

But even at half the price, Peale’s imitation couldn’t hold it candle to the proceedings at the National, where Maclzel himself—a stout, florid, lively, and urbane man of fifty-lour—introduced the original cast, beginning with its gray-eyed intellectual star. The Turk was rolled into the hall on casters, and Macl/el moved it around the room to give all the spectators a clear view. Then, to prove that no one was hidden inside the