Automatons & New Media History

Since we've been reading about new media history, especially the idea of man in the machine (or machine in the man), I'd like to throw in a new topic, an automaton that was famous for nearly 80 years.

In 1769, the automaton debuted in Europe, von Kempelen's chess player. Audiences went wild over the automated chess player in its "lifetime," and notables who saw it included Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin, among others. In the 19th-century, Poe wrote an article entitled "Maelzel's Chess Player" about the phenomenon. Poe used the terminology "pure machine" to indicate an apparatus that operated without the direct influence of a human operator--

Nothing has been written on this topic which can be considered as decisive — and accordingly we find every where men of mechanical genius, of great general acuteness, and discriminative understanding, who make no scruple in pronouncing the Automaton a pure machine, unconnected with human agency in its movements, and consequently, beyond all comparison, the most astonishing of the inventions of mankind. And such it would undoubtedly be, were they right in their supposition.

People were entranced by the idea of what they thought was a machine thinking. It turned out that there was a man hidden inside the contraption, which has been reconstructed in the more recent past.

There's a wikipedia article on it at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk

The Poe article is online at http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/maelzel.htm

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