The Turk
The automaton looked like a cabinet with a figure in Turkish dress seated behind it. Before a game Kempelen opened its little doors and showed the gearwheels inside. But hidden inside was a skilled chess player who operated the figure. The secret remained undiscovered for a long time.
Famous opponents
The automaton toured Europe and America. According to reports from the time it played against Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon, who is said to have lost and swept the pieces off the board in anger. The Turk burned in 1854 in a museum in Philadelphia.
The speaking machine
Less well known, but scientifically more important, is Kempelen's speaking machine. Using bellows and tubes it imitated the human vocal cords and mouth and could pronounce simple words. Kempelen wrote a book about it that is considered a foundation of phonetics and a distant ancestor of voice assistants.
Legacy
Kempelen's Turk is a symbol of the human longing for thinking machines. More than two centuries later the computer Deep Blue beat the world champion for real.