Wolfgang von Kempelen by Farbod Gorjian

Wolfgang von Kempelen was born in Pozsony, Hungary (today it is Bratislava, Slovakia) in 1734. He is famous for his construction of The Turk, an automatic chess playing machine. The Turk was revealed to be a hoax, although I don't believe that takes anything away from it and it's still very interesting. Von Kempelen constructed a table with a chessboard on top and a mannequin like figure dressed in traditional Turkish robes sitting opposite. The chessboard on the top of the cabinet was thin enough to allow for a magnetic linkage. Each piece in the chess set had a small, strong magnet attached to its base with string under their specific places on the board. This allowed the real chess player hidden inside the machine to see which pieces moved where on the chess board. The Turk won almost every game it played in Europe & the Americas for almost 85 years, including games against Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin among others. Kempelen also created a manually operated Speaking Machine which was a genuine pioneering step in experimental phonetics. His work was the basis for Sir Charles Wheatstone's new improved version which so inspired Alexander Graham Bell to pursue his fascination with convincingly reproducing human speech. The Wolfgang von Kempelen Computing Science History Prize was named in his honour.