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February 20, 2012 11:00 am PST

A man and his machines

For years the Turk, a chess-playing automaton, toured Europe and America, delighting audiences and besting Catherine the Great,Napoleon Bonaparte andBenjamin Franklin. But the Turk was a trick: Somewhere inside the cabinet was a human, playing the pieces on the board. No one knew how it worked at the time. Then, in 1854, it was destroyed in a fire and the illusion was lost. The Turk reappeared 130 years later, in Atwater, California, re-created from fragments by John Gaughan, a master magic builder who spent $120,000 of his own money on the duplicitous automaton.


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/0neHSrR3W08/gaughan.html

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