An Attempt to Analyse the Automaton Chess Player of Mr. De Kempelen

In 1769, Wolfgang von Kempelen unveiled a mechanical Turk: a life-sized automaton in flowing robes, seated before a chess board, capable of playing against any challenger. It defeated Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon. It mesmerized European courts. But was it truly a machine? Robert Willis, writing in the early 19th century, subjected Kempelen's creation to rigorous mechanical analysis, dissecting its claimed inner workings with the precision of an engineer and the skepticism of a natural philosopher. What follows is both a technical treatise and an intellectual thriller: the unraveling of one of the Enlightenment's most seductive illusions. Willis reveals not just how the automaton functioned, but what its deception tells us about the boundaries between human ingenuity and artificial imitation. This is a window into an era captivated by the promise of thinking machines, and the lengths to which inventors would go to conjure that illusion.