Can I read The Turk : the life and times of the famous eighteenth-century chess-playing machine on EtoBox?

The Turk : the life and times of the famous eighteenth-century chess-playing machine by Standage, Tom is a history book available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Turk : the life and times of the famous eighteenth-century chess-playing machine about?

In the annals of man and machine, The Turk has to rank among the most astonishing stories. In 1769, Baron Von Kempelen, engineer to the Imperial Court in Vienna, was so unimpressed by the performance of a visiting conjurer that he boasted he could do better. He built a mechanical chess-playing mannequin, dressed like a Turk, capable of beating even the Court's best players. Over the next decades, the Turk toured the courts of Europe to tremendous acclaim. Amid the craze for automata that swept Europe during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as the Industrial Revolution developed, it was one of the wonders of its time: Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon were among the luminaries who lost to it. Eventually, the Turk ended up in America, where it toured for many years before being destroyed by a fire in 1854. But was it a fraud? The colorful story of the Turk involves a diverse cast of Ludwig van Beethoven, Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Babbage and many others, and encompasses the history of magic, the rise of machines, the debate over mechanical reasoning, and the early days of artificial intelligence.

Who reads The Turk : the life and times of the famous eighteenth-century chess-playing machine?

Author

Standage, Tom

Publisher

Berkley Trade

Published

2003

Language

EN

ISBN

9780425190395

Category

history

Subjects

Sports, Anthropology, Fiction

Rating

3.91 / 5 (370 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14