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

In actuality, Maelzel left for Europe in late 1828 and returned to the US in early 1829 with a new assortment of automata he had (presumably) purchased. According to this article, they included “The Cathedral of Rheims,” the “amusing little shoemaker,” the “French Oyster Woman”, the “Old French Gentleman of the Ancient Regime”, the “Little Troubador”, “Punchinello” and the “Carrousel” or “Grand Tournament,” a display of automaton horses and riders. It seems that Schlumberger stayed behind. For the sake of brevity, I omitted the trip and just had Maelzel send for the automata — which he actually had done, in an earlier year.

Other events that I (regretfully) had to leave out of the script, and which happened around this same time period, were the creation of — and Maelzel’s $1,000 failed bribe to close down — the rival the Walker Chess-Player, the chess match “lost” to the aging Charles Caroll, and Maelzel’s decision to sell off several of his other automata into a separate traveling show run by three other men, which eventually failed and was reabsorbed into the main show.