The Mechanical Turk is unveiled in Vienna

1770

Wolfgang von Kempelen built a chess-playing automaton and first displayed it at Schönbrunn Palace in 1770, after promising Empress Maria Theresa he would surpass a visiting French illusionist. The cabinet in fact concealed a human chess player. An operator's escape was witnessed during a Baltimore exhibition in 1827, but the mechanism was not fully published until Silas Mitchell's articles in The Chess Monthly in 1857, after the Turk was destroyed by fire in 1854.