The curious case of the chess-playing machine

In 1827, Baltimore crowds gathered at the Fountain Inn on Light Street to see Johann Maelzel’s Automaton Chess Player, (also dubbed The Turk), a mechanical chess-playing contraption from Europe that had sparked debate about whether machines could think like humans.

Nine years later, in Richmond, Va., Edgar Allan Poe published an article claiming the device was a hoax. “Maelzel’s Chess Player,” from the April 1836 Southern Literary Messenger, contained 17 pieces of proof for why the automaton was more man than machine. The essay was praised by contemporary papers; the Norfolk Herald said it was one of the “best articles of any kind which have ever appeared in an American Periodical.”

A chess master was indeed hidden inside the machine. But Poe’s explanation for how it worked was incorrect.

Poe’s analytical approach was what impressed his peers, more so than the solution itself, said Scott Peeples, a Poe scholar and professor of English at the College of Charleston.

In fact, it was the Baltimore Gazette that first broke the story of the man inside the machine in June 1827. Two local boys had seen a man emerge from a hidden compartment.

But their eyewitness claim was quickly dismissed. “We will wager Pompey’s pillar against a cambric needle that the editor of the Gazette had been deceived,” wrote the New York Commercial Advertiser.