The Mechanical Turk: How a Chess-playing Hoax Inspired Real Computers

(Credit: Karl Gottlieb von Windisch/Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image)

In 1783, an autonomous machine beat Benjamin Franklin in a game of chess. Well, at least that’s what he was led to believe.  

Franklin’s opponent was a life-size, humanlike figure seated at a large wooden cabinet, supposedly rigged with machinery that made it capable of playing a game of chess without human support. It was known as the Turk.

Over 230 years after the automaton played its match in Paris agai