"Maelzel's Chess Player" (1836) is an

essay An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal a ...

Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe (; Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is wide ...

exposing a fraudulent

automaton An automaton (; plural: automata or automatons) is a relatively self-operating machine, or control mechanism designed to automatically follow a sequence of operations, or respond to predetermined instructions.Automaton – Definition and More ...

chess Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to disti ...

player called The Turk, which had become famous in

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

and the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

and toured widely. The fake automaton was invented by

Wolfgang von Kempelen Johann Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen de Pázmánd ( hu, Kempelen Farkas; 23 January 1734 – 26 March 1804) was a Hungarian author and inventor, known for his chess-playing "automaton" hoax The Turk and for his speaking machine. Personal lif ...

in 1769 and was brought to the U.S. in 1825 by

Johann Nepomuk Mälzel A metronome by Maelzel, Paris, 1815. Johann Nepomuk Maelzel (or Mälzel; August 15, 1772 – July 21, 1838) was a German inventor, engineer, and showman, best known for manufacturing a metronome and several music-playing automatons, and displayi ...

after von Kempelen's death.

Background

In his essay, Poe asserts that a mechanical chess player would play perfectly, but Maelzel's "machine" occasionally errs, and is therefore suspect. Although it is the most famous essay on the Turk, many of Poe's hypotheses were incorrect. He also may or may not have been aware of earlier articles written in the '' Baltimore Gazette'' where two youths were reported to have seen chess player

William Schlumberger William Schlumberger (1800 – April 1838) was a European chess master. He is known to have taught Pierre Charles Fournier de Saint-Amant to play chess and as the operator of The Turk, a chess-playing machine which was purported to be an automato ...

climbing out of the machine. He did, however, borrow heavily from David Brewster's ''Letters on Natural Magic''. Other essays and articles had been written and published prior to Poe's in

Baltimore Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, and List of United States cities by popula ...

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

, and

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

—cities in which Poe had lived or visited before writing his essay. Poe's essay was originally published in the April 1836 issue of the ''

Southern Literary Messenger The ''Southern Literary Messenger'' was a periodical published in Richmond, Virginia, from August 1834 to June 1864, and from 1939 to 1945. Each issue carried a subtitle of "Devoted to Every Department of Literature and the Fine Arts" or some var ...

.'' Poe's essay asserts that Maelzel's troupe of automata had made at least one previous visit to

Richmond, Virginia (Thus do we reach the stars) , image_map = , mapsize = 250 px , map_caption = Location within Virginia , pushpin_map = Virginia#USA , pushpin_label = Richmond , pushpin_m ...

, "some years ago", at which time they were exhibited "in the house now occupied by M. Bossieux as a dancing academy". Yet, very oddly, Poe gives no precise date or location for his own more recent encounter with Maelzel's Chess-Player, apart from stating that it was exhibited in Richmond "a few weeks ago". No known 19th- or 20th-century biography of Poe discloses when or where in Richmond he witnessed the performance of the Automaton Chess-Player.

Importance

The essay is important in that it predicts some general motifs of modern

science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ...

. Poe also was beginning to create an analytic method that would eventually be used in his "tales of

ratiocination Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, langu ...

", the earliest form of a

detective story Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective—whether professional, amateur or retired—investigates a crime, often murder. The detective genre began around the same time as specu ...

, "

The Gold-Bug "The Gold-Bug" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe published in 1843. The plot follows William Legrand, who was bitten by a gold-colored bug. His servant Jupiter fears that Legrand is going insane and goes to Legrand's friend, an ...

" and "

The Murders in the Rue Morgue "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe published in ''Graham's Magazine'' in 1841. It has been described as the first modern detective story; Poe referred to it as one of his "tales of ratiocination". C. Auguste Dup ...

". This point is furthered in that Poe particularly emphasized that a ''mind'' was operating the machine. Response at the time of its publication was strong. It elicited responses from the ''Norfolk Herald'', ''Baltimore Gazette'', ''Baltimore Patriot'', ''United States Gazette'', ''Charleston Courier'', ''Winchester Virginian'', and ''New Yorker'' (the last of which suggested the article's only fault was its excessive length).Wimsatt, W.K. "Poe and the Chess Automaton" in ''On Poe: The Best of "American Literature"''. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993: 78. Poe's "Maelzel's Chess Player" was the inspiration for the television short ''El jugador de ajedrez'' aka ''Le joueur d'échecs de Maelzel'' (1981), directed by

Juan Luis Buñuel Juan Luis Buñuel (9 November 1934, Paris – 6 December 2017, Paris) was a film and television director, screenwriter, and actor. His films include ''Expulsion of the Devil'' (''Au rendez-vous de la mort joyeuse'', 1973) and ''La Femme aux ...

and shown as part of the Poe-series ''Histoires extraordinaires''. The essay is cited without name by

Walter Benjamin Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish ...

in the first of his "Theses on the Philosophy of History".

References

External links

Timeline of publications
at th
Edgar Allan Poe Society online
* {{Edgar Allan Poe Essays by Edgar Allan Poe 1836 essays Works originally published in the Southern Literary Messenger Chess automatons 1836 in chess Essays about chess