Machine intelligence, 1783

Windisch, Karl Gottlieb von. Lettres de M. Charles Gottlieb de Windisch sur le joueur d'échecs de M. de Kempelen. Traduction libre de l'Allemand.

€ 9.500,00

First French edition of Windisch’s report on Wolfgang von Kempelen’s celebrated chess-playing automaton, published on the occasion of its European tour of 1783. Windisch's account was issued in the same year as the German original; it is here translated by the great Swiss art dealer and engraver Christian von Mechel.

Written at the height of European fascination with automata, the letters explain the public demonstrations of "the Mechanical Turk", the cabinet in which it appeared, and the means by which it could convincingly play a strong game of chess. In fact, the machine was merely an elaborate simulation of mechanical automation: a human chess master, of small physical build, was concealed inside the cabinet and puppeteered the 'Turk' from below by means of a series of levers. With a skilled operator, the 'Turk' won most of the games played during its demonstrations around Europe and the Americas for decades, playing and defeating many challengers including statesmen such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Although the machine was soon suspected to be a hoax, it was never accurately described while it existed (it perished in 1854, in a fire in Philadelphia).

Mechel's three folding plates (based on Kempelen’s own drawings) provide the contemporary visual documentation that made the pamphlet especially desirable to readers interested in mechanics, scientific spectacle, and the Enlightenment culture of marvels. In the 1797 English edition of this work, the three plates of this edition are reduced and combined into a single folding frontispiece.

Beyond its place in chess literature, the work belongs to the early history of technological illusion and the long prehistory of debates about machine intelligence.