Clockwork Game: The Illustrious Career of a Chess-Playing Automaton

Something that’s easy to forget in these days of computers approaching artificial intelligence is just how intimidating a machine like this would be. At the time of this scene, the industrial revolution was just barely getting underway, and it was off to a rocky start. James Watt was still perfecting his steam engine; it wouldn’t enter production for another five years. Some thirty years before, a man named Vaucanson had created the first fully automatic silk loom (driven by punchcards, no less). Furious at the idea of a machine replacing skilled tradesmen, the weavers of Lyon rebelled against Vaucanson with such violence that he was forced to disguise himself as a monk and flee under cover of night.
From the standpoint of the nobility gathered at Schönbrunn Palace, this automaton — which von Kempelen claimed could think just like a human being — would not have been a mere amusement. A thinking machine, even one that could only play chess, constituted a breakthrough of unimaginable proportion and consequence, and especially when considering the scientific discoveries of that era such a machine must have seemed entirely plausible.