"Maelzel's Chess Player" (1836) is an essay written by Edgar Allan Poe. It describes a fake chess-playing machine called The Turk, which became well-known in Europe and the United States. The machine was created in 1769 by Wolfgang von Kempelen. After von Kempelen died, Johann Nepomuk Mälzel brought the machine to the United States in 1825.

Background

In his essay, Poe says that a mechanical chess player would play perfectly, but Maelzel's "machine" sometimes makes mistakes, which makes it questionable. Although this is the most famous essay about the Turk, many of Poe's ideas were wrong. He may or may not have known about earlier reports in the Baltimore Gazette that described two young people seeing a chess player named William Schlumberger exit the machine. However, Poe used many ideas from David Brewster's book, Letters on Natural Magic. Before Poe wrote his essay, other essays and articles were published in cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston, which Poe had lived in or visited.

Poe's essay was first published in the April 1836 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger.

In the essay, Poe claims that Maelzel's group of automata had visited Richmond, Virginia, "some years ago" and were shown in a building now used as a dancing academy by M. Bossieux. However, Poe does not provide a specific date or location for his more recent experience with Maelzel's Chess-Player, only stating it was shown in Richmond "a few weeks ago." No known books about Poe's life from the 19th or 20th centuries mention when or where in Richmond he saw the Automaton Chess-Player perform.

Importance

The essay is important because it introduces themes that appear in modern science fiction. Poe was also developing a method of thinking that he later used in his "tales of ratiocination," which are considered the first detective stories, such as "The Gold-Bug" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." This idea is supported by Poe's focus on the idea that a human mind was controlling the machine.

When the essay was published, it received many responses from newspapers, including the Norfolk Herald, Baltimore Gazette, Baltimore Patriot, United States Gazette, Charleston Courier, Winchester Virginian, and New Yorker. The New Yorker noted that the only problem with the article was that it was too long.

Poe's essay "Maelzel's Chess Player" inspired a television short called El jugador de ajedrez (also known as Le joueur d'échecs de Maelzel, 1981), directed by Juan Luis Buñuel. This short was part of the Poe-themed series Histoires extraordinaires.

The essay is mentioned without naming the author by Walter Benjamin in the first of his "Theses on the Philosophy of History."

The essay is also referenced by Jean Cocteau in his work Barbette (1928).