Potpourri

he'd been looking in the right direction at all. The cow had been standing there one minute and next well, it was gone. Emil ran over to the spot where the cow had vanished from and discovered the reason why. There was a large hole in the ground. It had chosen that very moment open wide and had dropped out beneath the cow like a trap door in a Scooby Doo cartoon. Of course, their first priority was to get the cow back out, and that took a bit of time.

Cows are heavy, after all, and they have a tendency to kick and fight. But they eventually managed to free the fallen beast from the pit, and that's when they got a good look at what was down there, and it baffled them. They could see bricks. Neat tidy rows of uniform bricks were visible in the soil and roots below the surface of the field, so Emil grabbed the

shovel and began to dig around them. Soon enough, he and his father were standing in a small chamber with walls of brick and tiled floor, and there were objects inside. Word quickly spread. A local teacher visited the farm and alerted the government to the discovery. Local scholars began to flock to the farm for their chance in helping with the excavation. Over the next five years, the dig site was extended, eventually revealing a number of chambers, each with

their own collection of artifacts. That's where things got strange. First, you have to remember that no one knew these chambers were there in the field until the cow had fallen through the ceiling of one of the rooms. But they were an odd collection of items that made that difficult to believe. Yes, while some of the items in the chamber dated back to the first century, others were much newer,

possibly as recent as the fifteenth century. There has been a lot of controversy about the discovery over the years. Emil was accused of forging the entire site, but that claim was finally dismissed in court. More modern tools in the last couple of decades have allowed scientists to determine the true age of some of the oldest pottery there, dating back roughly two thousand years. There are bone fragments from the thirteenth century and ceramic tablets with Phoenician writing

on them. It's like a potpourri of archaeological clues, making it very difficult to nail down exactly when the chambers were built. And none of that even comes close to the biggest question of all. Why Why was this set of chambers constructed? Why did someone want to gather up so many of these seemingly disparate items and store them all in one place, And why were they hidden away, buried beneath the surface of a field in the middle of France. Nearly a century later. The answer is the

same as it's always been. We just don't know. They built a machine that could play chess. Now I understand that's not exactly earth shattering news. We live in an era where Deep Blue from IBM and Alpha zero from Deep Mind can be just about any opponent placed in front of them clearly. Artificial intelligence has grown by leaps and bounds, allowing us to pack more and more power into the devices we use each day. But this wasn't a sleek, modern processor fueled brain. It was a wooden

box and a mechanical dummy. They called it the Turk, and it was built in Vienna around seventeen seventy. Think of it like a large wooden chest four ft long, two ft wide and about three ft tall. Hefty for sure, but it served as a desk upon which a chessboard sat, and behind that desk stood the Turk himself. Well him might be stretching it. The Turk was a mechanical man, an automaton if you want to be technical about it,

and this eighteenth century robot could play chess. The man who invented it was Barren Wolfgang von Kemperlin, an inventor from Hungary who was born in seventeen thirty four. Armed with this amazing device, he traveled all across Europe, pitting his invention against the best chess players he could find.

He would begin each match by opening all of the cabinet doors beneath the desktops, so everyone gathered could see his brilliant mechanical engineering, firsthand gears and cogs and drums and levers, all of it served to power the Turk as it picked up chess pieces and made move after move against the humans who chose to play it, and most of the time the robot one. It said that the Turk defeated Napoleon, Benjamin Franklin, even Empress Catherine the

First of Russia. It was so popular that after von Kempelin died in eighteen o four, the Turk was sold to a Bavarian musician who carried on the constant touring

in the eighteen twenties. That tour included America. In fact, the author Edgar Allen Poe watched one of these demonstrations himself in eighteen thirty six, and then went on to write an article about it in a periodical called The Southern Literary Messenger, which is ironic because just a few years later the Turk would be purchased by Postoned physician

John Circely Mitchell. All told the Turk was a source of entertainment and delight for nearly seventy years and inspired a lot of questions and a lot of wonder which I have to admit, is still pretty attractive today. The fact that someone built a mechanical device over two d and fifty years ago that could play chess and beat humans, well, it sounds like something out of a Jewels Verne novel,

and yet it happened, well sort of. You see, there are enough drawings and firsthand accounts of how the device operated to hint at the true power of the robot. Thanks to magnets in the base of each chess piece and corresponding metal balls in the inside surface of the chess board, it was possible for a person to watch the game unfold and then operate the robot like a puppet as the game moved along. Sadly, the Turk was destroyed in a museum fire in July of eighteen fifty four.

It and that happened the physical proof of its trickery literally went up in smoke. Still, it's hard not to see our modern world reflected in that eighteenth century invention. In the pursuit of progress and entertainment, we still try our best to cram as much power as possible into our devices. At least we've stopped using live humans to

do it. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities, subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.