Maelzel also continued inventing, although he died aboard a ship next to the Turk, still deeply in love with it. Before his death, though, he created a portable metronome to keep the beat in music, an orchestrion (picture a robot orchestra), and a panharmonicon—an automaton that played military music.
Instead, the elaborate ritual of opening all of the doors and shining a light in the dark cabinet only helped mask what was really happening when the Turk went into action. A person, usually a chess master in on the secret, sat hidden inside the box.
Each time a new door was opened, the hidden chess master scooted to the opposite side on an oiled bench. The chess player didn’t even have to be child-sized; they just had to know when to bend and roll in order to stay out of sight.
chess master:
Kempelen figured out it was safer to approach a chess master, let him in on the secret, and have him be the operator than try to play against him, and probably lose.
The smoke from the operator’s candle went out through the Turk’s turban, and air holes were poked into the box. In the days before electricity, rooms were always smoke-filled, so no one noticed a little extra smoke hanging about the Turk like a halo. If the candle went out, the operator had a system worked out to notify Kempelen and, later, Maelzel. The box was still a dark, smoky place to hang out, so the shows were limited to an hour long. You know, so the operator wouldn’t pass out. That kind of thing would give the Turk away.
Not the actual inner workings.
Not everything about the Turk was fake, though. Those levers the Turk relied on to move his arm were quite creative, and there were magnets involved after all. Magnets were placed above the head of the operator inside the box, each one corresponding to a chess piece. When the opponent made a move, the magnets told the hidden chess master which pieces went where. (The magnets Kempelen and Maelzel allowed near the box did nothing to affect the ones inside due to their positioning.)
All of the machinery, creaks, and noises added to the mystique of a working automaton. In the end, people wanted to believe in the mystery, so they did. It wasn’t a bad thing, either, since it helped inspire not one, but two revolutions—the Industrial and the computer.
When Lying Is a Good Thing
Okay, so the Turk was a big fat fraud. At least he wasn’t taking over the world anytime soon. And even better, the chess-player inspired some real inventions that you would miss today.
While all those skeptics thought no machine could ever be capable of playing chess, another guy thought exactly the opposite. Charles Babbage had always been interested in mechanical objects. So he decided to challenge the Turk. Babbage was convinced that the Turk was a fake, but he thought such a machine was possible. It just needed the right, smart guy to figure it out. And he knew just the smart guy capable of making a robot play chess or checkers—himself.
Babbage got so excited about his own dream to build such a machine that he made himself sick. After a short vacation to help stop the vomiting and hives, he drew up plans for a machine that could think on its own, in a way. Many failures, bankruptcy, and sleepless nights later, Babbage created the forerunner to the modern computer.
It was this desire to imitate life that led to more mechanical developments and more complex machinery. The Industrial Revolution gained steam directly from the popularity of automatons. People started thinking, “Wouldn’t it be great if the robot got its hands rubbed raw from weaving instead of mine?” So they came up with cool inventions like the power loom to do all the grunt work.
Lessons from a Computer
It wasn’t until 1997 that a machine finally beat a human chess master. Soviet Garry Kasparov had beat a chess-playing computer called Deep Blue (as well as all those nerds who built him) in 1989 and then again in 1996. Confident he’d keep winning, Kasparov agreed to a third match in 1997. He figured it was his duty to protect the human race from intelligent computers of the chess-playing ilk.
Deeper Blue (the new computer) brought his thinking cap this time though—meaning he had his hardware upgraded. This allowed the computer to analyze two hundred million positions per second. The computer won, and Kasparov was stunned. He demanded a rematch, insisting Deeper Blue had cheated, but no dice. The creators quickly retired their creation and refused any more matches. That’s how to quit when you’re ahead.
Kasparov himself, not the least bit bitter.
In fact, the power loom—invented by Edmund Cartwright—was inspired by none other than the Turk himself, allegedly. Cartwright saw the Turk play in London (while it was touring with Kempelen) and thought it was terrific. Sure, he believed an automaton really was playing chess, but it allowed him to think if that was possible, anything was possible. We’ll forgive him this mistake, since it led to the power loom three years later and mass-produced Angry Bird t-shirts today.
Acknowledgments
Like many of the men and women between these pages, this book would have never existed if it weren’t for the enthusiasm of many more living and breathing people. Thanks to Carrie Pestritto for never giving up hope and for finding Julie Matysik, the perfect editor; Bethany Stark, for the right dose of illustrative humor; Rita Gartley and Frances Lovato, for always being at the library; Professor Michael Barnes for vetting scholarly books and looking over Homer (any mistakes are mine); my supportive family, and my friends, Jacki Shepherd, Stevie Lloyd, Barbara Krutulis, and Ron Erickson for their insightful contributions.
And mostly, thanks to my husband, Tim Hammerly. He is bigger than life.
Notes on Sources
Chapter One
John Green’s highly entertaining YouTube Channel, Crash Course World History, does a great video on “2,000 Years of Chinese History,” which had a great segment on Confucius and Tian. A comparison of Confucius’s many confusing lives came from the sources as well as a nice summary from Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Chapter Two
You can throw a stick and hit about fifty books on George Washington in any given library. They’re everywhere. So I stuck with reading all of Ron Chernow’s Washington, and corroborated his findings with a variety of others.
Chapter Three
Pythagoras was pretty wily in evading detection, but I managed to track down good books on his baloney butt by Alberto A. Martinez and Carl Huffman. Original sources from ancient philosophers shed light as well as Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Chapter Four
Original sources such as speeches and Benjamin Franklin’s letters helped on the Iroquois’s contribution to the budding United States. The Iroquois Museum and basic biographies helped tell me the legend of Hiawatha. Grinnell College’s website clarified the various roles of the wampum beads.
Chapter Five
M. L. West’s East Face of Helicon has a lot of great research on the transmission of oral and written poetry from East to West, and much of the information about Gilgamesh comes from there as well as the various essays in Blackwell’s Companions to the Ancient World. The Arkansas State Religious Studies website provided a blow-by-blow of the many tablets of the epic. The version you got is a mixture of Standard Version and Old Babylonian version. The definitive scholarship on the Sumerian King List is from 1939—yes that long ago—and was written by Thorkild Jacobsen.
Chapter Six
Ben Macintyre wrote the book on Operation Mincemeat. Literally.
Chapter Seven
Shakespeare was tricky. There are so many passionate people arguing many ways about Shakespeare’s existence. I tried to keep my bias to a minimum and referenced both sides of the argument. Stephan Greenblatt wrote his book without acknowledging the controversy, and the Declaration of Reasonable doubt is a great site for all those doubters out there. Information about collaboration in Elizabethan and Jacobean times came from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Alan C. Dessen and Oxford’s Brian Vickers.
Chapter Eight
Pope Joan is highly controversial still. There’s over
five hundred mentions of her in various libraries around the world, but I tried to look at both sides of the coin—both Catholic and Protestant sources. Anything too fanciful or wishful I avoided like a pope down Vicus Papissa. Thanks again to John Green’s Crash Course Renaissance video for explaining what humanists focus on!
Chapter Nine
Again, I relied on those scholars who have devoted their lives to figuring out which came first: Homer or The Iliad. There are many views on how exactly a performer preformed, and, of course, these things changed over the centuries. I used Dr. Nagy’s views, Blackwell’s Companions to the Ancient World was especially great, and Yale’s Open Courses Introduction to Greek History by Donald Kagan helped me remember my own days at the University of Missouri in the Classics department. Go Tigers!
Chapter Ten
Don’t discount dissertations! Michael E. Brooks did all the grunt work on Prester John in his paper, Prester John: A Reexamination and Compendium of the Mythical Figure Who Helped Spark European Expansion.
Chapter Eleven
The legends of the Sage Emperors come from many places including Anne Birrell’s Chinese Mythology, Keith G. Steven’s Chinese Mythological Gods, and Cultural China’s website. Again, John Green’s Crash Course World History, does a great video on “2,000 Years of Chinese History” to keep all those dynasties and their Tian-shaming ways straight. More scholars like Michael Puett and Mark Edward Lewis had great insights on the Warring States Period’s elite, and the evolution of Huangdi from oral tradition to modern-day god.
Chapter Twelve
Tom Standage’s The Turk covers the history of both owners, as well as Deep Blue’s showdown in 1989, 1996, and 1997.
Sources
Chapter One
Confucius. The Analects. Translated by Raymond Dawson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Green, John. “2000 Years of Chinese History!” Crash Course World History. Podcast video. March 8, 2012. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylWORyToTo4.
Kelen, Betty. Confucius: In Life and Legend. New York: Thomas Neslon, 1971.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University, Sept. 2006. Jan 2013. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/confucius/.
Wilker, Josh. Confucius: Philosopher and Teacher. New York: Franklin Watts, 1999.
Chapter Two
Carbone, Gerald M. Washington. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Chernow, Rob. Washington: A Life. New York: Penguin Press, 2010.
George Washington. BrainyQuote.com, Xplore Inc, 2014. www.brainyquote.com/citation/quotes/quotes/g/georgewash135802.html.
George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Last modified 2014. www.mountvernon.org/.
Green, John. “Who Won the American Revolution?” Crash Course US History. Podcast video. March 14, 2013. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EiSymRrKI4&list=PL8dPuuaLjXtMwmepBjTSG593eG7ObzO7s.
Morris Jr., Seymour. American History Revised: 200 Startling Facts. New York: Broadway Books, 2010.
PBS. www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/british-navy-impressment/.
Woods Jr., Thomas E. 33 Questions About American History You’re Not supposed to Ask. New York: Crown Forum, 2007.
Chapter Three
Aristotle. Fragments. Translated by Jonathan Barnes and Gavin Lawrence. Vol. 2 of The Complete Works of Aristotle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Burkert, Walter. Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972.
Huffman, Carl. “Pythagoras.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Last modified August 8, 2011. Accessed October 21, 2013. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pythagoras/.
Laertius, Diogenes. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Translated by R. D. Hicks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925.
Martinez, Alberto A. The Cult of Pythagoras: Math and Myths. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 2012.
Zhmud, Leonid. Pythagoras and the Early Pythagoreans. Translated by Kevin Windle and Rosh Ireland. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Chapter Four
“All About Wampum.” Grinnell College. Last modified 2001. http://web.grinnell.edu/courses/edu/f01/edu315-01/liberato/wampum.html.
Canassatego. “Excerpts from speeches by Canassatego, an Iroquois, as printed by Benjamin Franklin, 1740s.” Smithsonian Source. Last modified 2007. www.smithsoniansource.org/display/primarysource/viewdetails.aspx?PrimarySourceId=1195.
Dennis, Matthew. “The League of the Iroquois.” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Accessed May 23, 2014. www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/american-indians/essays/league-iroquois.
Franklin, Benjamin. “Benjamin Franklin on the Iroquois League, in a letter to James Parker, 1751.” Smithsonian Source. Last modified 2007. www.smithsoniansource.org/display/primarysource/viewdetails.aspx?PrimarySourceId=1198.
Green, John. “The Black Legend, Native Americans, and Spaniards” Crash Course US History. Podcast video. January 31, 2013. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E9WU9TGrec&list=PL8dPuuaLjXtMwmepBjTSG593eG7ObzO7s&index=2.
Iroquois Museum. www.iroquoismuseum.org/.
Johansen, Bruce E. Forgotten Founders: Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois, and the Rationale for the American Revolution. Ipswich, MA: Gambit Inc, 1982.
McCarld, Megan and George Ypsilantis. Hiawatha and the Iroquois League. Alvin Josephy’s Biography Series of American Indians. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Silver Burdett Press, 1989.
Morgan, Lewis Henry. League of the Iroquois. Seacaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1962.
Chapter Five
Foley, John Miles, ed. A Companion to Ancient Epic. Blackwell’s Companions to the Ancient World. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
Hooker, Richard. “The Epic of Gilgamesh.” Arkansas State. www.clt.astate.edu/.
Jacobsen, Thorkild. The Sumerian King List. Assyriological Studies 11. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago, 1939.
Katz, Dina. “Gilgamesh and Akka: Was Uruk Rule By Two Assemblies?” Revue d’Assyriologie et d’Archeologie Orientale 81 (1987): 105–114.
Michigan Department of Education. Michigan’s Genre Project. Accessed October 22, 2013. http://michigan.gov/documents/mde/Genre_Project_197249_7.pdf.
New Day. “Blueprint for Noah’s Ark Found?” CNN. Video file, 4:43. January 28, 2014. www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2014/01/28/noahs-ark-blueprint-finkel-newday.cnn.html.
West, M. L. The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth. Oxford, New York City: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Chapter Six
Crowdy, Terry. Deceiving Hitler: Double Cross and Deception in World War II. London: Osprey Publishing, 2008.
Macintyre, Ben. Operation Mincemeat. New York: Broadway Paperbacks, 2010.
Rice, Earle. Strategic Battles in Europe. San Diego, CA: Lucent Books, 2000.
Chapter Seven
Declaration of Reasonable Doubt. Last modified 2013. http://doubtaboutwill.org/declaration.
Dessen, Alan C. “The Elizabethan and Jacobean Script-to-Stage Process: The Playwright, Theatrical Intentions, and Collaboration.” In Shakespeare and Intention. Published in Style 44 no. 3 (2010): 391–403.
Greaves, Richard L. Society and Religion in Elizabethan England. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1981.
Greenblatt, Stephan. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2004.
“How We Know that Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare.” http://shakespeareauthorship.com/howdowe.html.
The Shakespearean Authorship Trust. www.shakespeareanauthorshiptrust.org.uk/.
Vickers, Brian. Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Chapter Eight
Grayson, Saisha. “Disruptive Disguises: The Problem of Transvestite Saints for Medieval Art, Identity, and Identification.” In the Journal of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship. MFF 45, no.2 (2009): 138–74. http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/v
iewcontent.cgi?article=1814&context=mff.
Kirsch, Johann Peter. “Popess Joan.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 8. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910. March 10, 2014. www.newadvent.org/cathen/08407a.htm.
Mystery Files. “Pope Joan.” Season 2, Episode 9. Smithsonian Channel. First broadcast June 10, 2011. Directed by Ben Mole.
Pardoe, Rosemary and Darroll. The Female Pope. Northhamptonshire, England: Crucible, 1988.
Rustici, Craig M. The Afterlife of Pope Joan. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Ann Arbor Michigan, 2006.
Chapter Nine
Foley, John Miles. ed. A Companion to Ancient Epic. Blackwell’s Companions to the Ancient World. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
Kagan, Donald. “Introduction to Ancient Greek History.” Lectures presented at Yale, New Haven, CT. Video File. 2007. http://oyc.yale.edu/classics/clcv-205.
Makrinos, Antony. “The Reception of Homer in Byzantium.” UCL Lunch Hour Lectures. Video file, 31:53. Dec 8, 2003. Accessed October 4, 2013. www.ucl.ac.uk/lhl/lhlpub_spring09/04_290109.
Martin, Thomas R. “The Nature of the Noble Man for Alexander the Great the ‘Man Who Loved Homer.’” The Center for Hellenic Studies. Last Modified 2012. http://chs.harvard.edu/wa/pageR?tn=ArticleWrapper&bdc=12&mn=4358.
Nagy, Gregory. Greek Mythology and Poetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Nagy, Gregory. “Performance and Text in Ancient Greece.” The Center for Hellenic Studies. Last Modified 2012. http://chs.harvard.edu/wa/pageR?tn=ArticleWrapper&bdc=12&mn=3626.
“Papyrus fragment with lines from Homer’s Odyssey [Greek, Ptolemaic] (09.182.50).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/09.182.50 (April 2007).
Famous Phonies Page 14