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

The concept that von Kempelen might enclose his speaking maching inside a mannequin — and his tendency to cover the machine with a sheet — is taken from Windisch’s book.

The speaking machine was also not Kempelen’s first attempt to create an aid for persons with disabilities; ten years earlier he created a typewriter for a young blind composer, so that she could correspond more easily.

The thing I find most fascinating about von Kempelen — and what drew me to tell his story, even in the light of his chess automaton’s unfortunate Orientalist overtones — is that he was a true gentleman scientist, and from all accounts that I’ve read, was genuinely devoted to bettering humanity with both his official work and his inventions. I can only imagine how much it must’ve burned him that the automaton was so much better received than his other, more worthwhile creations. He was also one of the last great Natural Philosophers, following in the footsteps of Newton and Leibniz, and succeeded by Goethe.

In fact, in the original draft of the script, this scene — with its discussion of art and its relationship to science — was supposed to take place between von Kempelen and Goethe. Goethe did, in fact, see the speaking machine demonstrated; he wrote to his patron that it “is not very loquacious, but it can pronounce certain childish words nicely.” Unfortunately, further research turned up that Goethe never traveled to Vienna, let alone Pressburg, so it’s much more likely that he was one of the thousands of anonymous viewers who filed past it during the 1783–84 tour. This meant that I had to dig up another character for the conversation. Hence, Jozsef — and the change was much for the better.