A man and his machines

Talking Turk and other wonders with magic-maker and automaton-collector John Gaughan

By Joshuah Bearman- Share this article

In 1770, Wolfgang von Kempelen wheeled a wooden box into the Habsburg court in Vienna. On top was a chessboard. Seated to one side was an automaton, wearing a dramatic coat and turban. It was called the Turk,” and it played chess quite well. For years the Turk toured Europe and America, delighting audiences and besting Catherine the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin 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. Until, 130 years later, the Turk reappeared in Atwater, California.

It was re-created, from fragments, by John Gaughan, a master magic builder who spent $120,000 of his own money on the duplicitous automaton. Gaughan himself is widely considered to be the greatest living designer of illusions; over the past 35 years, he’s built magic tricks for Ricky Jay, David Blaine, Harry Blackstone Jr., and, of course, our friends in spandex, Siegfried & Roy.

His studio, tucked behind the storefronts on Glendale Boulevard, looks like the carpentry workshop of a wizard. Alongside band saws and piles of lumber are thousands of illusions, housed in Wunderkammer that is one of the world’s best collections of magic from the past 200 years. There are wands, collapsing cages (that do, in fact, go up one’s sleeve), Houdini’s handcuffs, spirit bells, visages of the magician’s muse, Mephistopheles, a purse-sized blunderbuss, handbills from music-hall magic shows in London and Paris, and spring-loaded devices of all sizes and shapes. It is a unique personal museum, one rarely seen by the public, but Gaughan is happy to show visitors around his many artifacts.

Joshuah Bearman: When The Turk appeared in Vienna, people were accustomed to seeing mechanical figures already, right? So in the mind of the audience, it seemed like a new mechanical marvel — that can also somehow play chess.

John Gaughan: Right, they were used to seeing a lot of oddities, including mechanical figures, on tour in those days. That was high entertainment. There would be weird shaped figurines that would emit supposed voices, and other wonder-cabinet type things. Vaucanson’s digesting duck had made the rounds. As had many full-size automatons, not unlike this guy — (Gaughan gestures at a glass case containing a six foot, clarinet-wielding Enlightenment-era robot ^[1]) — so the Turk fit right in. It was another marvel of the day.

The real trick is finding a master chess player who is also a midget.

No midget required! All the old engravings positing how this thing worked showed a midget but they were wrong. It’s really a full size person.

No kidding.

You could fit in there quite comfortably. How’s your game?

Not good. I never recovered from being beaten by Spencer, who took the chess team captain’s spot in the third grade.

I’m a weak player as well, but I had read about the Turk for years and always wondered what the illusion was.

How long did it go undetected that it was an illusion?

It was several decades before anyone demonstrated the hoax, in the 1820s. But even then the true nature of the illusion was not known until I built this one. There have been over eight hundred books and articles and plays and films written about this thing and no one ever really knew how it worked. People suspected that there was somebody hidden inside, but that was it. But it turns out to be a very sophisticated illusion, especially for its time. It’s incredible that Klemperen pulled this thing off in the eighteenth century. Even today, when we demonstrate The Turk for chess clubs or magic conventions, it still fools everyone because it’s very convincing that the cabinet is empty. They know there’s someone in there, but they can’t figure out where.

Can we open the doors?

But of course! As you can see, all the panels open, the drawers and everything. Now, with the doors staying open, the entire cabinet spins, and you will notice that there is nothing inside but the gears that allow the Turk to play chess. Other than that, you can see right through the cabinet.

Wow. It really is astonishing, because you just can’t how a person can fit in there.^[2]

And then you lift up all of the Turk’s clothes and open the doors to the “chess playing apparatus.” See, there are doors here, and you put a candle through so they can see the machinery, and it all seems very convincing.

[Pause.] So how the fuck is there a dude inside here?!?!

Uh-huh. That’s how good the illusion is. But he’s in there, all right. And there’s enough light coming in for the player inside to see the internal chessboard and follow along as the director, outside with the audience, calls the game. “Rook to Queen 4 — a interesting move that perhaps might confound the Turk!”

So the chess-playing apparatus down here is actually for show? It doesn’t even control the surrogate board for the player?

Doesn’t do anything.

And the internal chess board was the piece that survived the fire, right?

It didn’t survive the fire. It had been removed and was stored separately when the original Turk burned.

How long ago did you start researching the Turk?

About thirty years ago.

So the chess board helped — but what there something else, some other clues that enabled you to really sort it out?

We’ll I’d been looking at engravings and diagrams of this thing in magic books for years. Early, I started some prototypes, fairly blind. And then about twenty years ago, I started developing a personal library of material about the Turk. And then we found some letters in one library that was correspondence with another museum, from the 1840s.

What was in the letters?

They were from a guy who had actually worked inside the Turk, and he was correcting someone else who had claimed to know how it works. So there were little diagrams and descriptions and oh boy — there it was!

Was it a big revelation?

Well, the illusionary principle of this thing was thought to have been invented at least a hundred years later. And this is really the first cabinet trick for a stage illusion, so the Turk involved some big innovations.

It’s interesting that this device was a wild success around the turn of the nineteenth century, just around the time that engineering and the early industrial revolution is appearing, which also felt like a form of magic to most people.

Indeed.

So audiences were probably equally willing to believe in an illusion as some new-fangled technology.

Well, that’s true. The hey day of magic went hand in hand with the industrial revolution. Kempelen was an inventor and held patents. But he also had magic effects in his personal collection, it was later discovered. And he innovated magic to create this thing.

And I read that Charles Babbage, who invented the first computer, had seen the Turk and that was part of what inspired him.

Yup. People then didn’t know it was an illusion. They thought it was a thinking machine. And Babbage thought: “My god, if they can build a machine that plays chess, I should be able to make a machine that that can execute various rational functions.”

So it was later that he built the analytical engine.

Which was programmed with punch cards. And Jaquard, whose looms were programmed that way, may have also seen the Turk. And that was how computing began.

It’s crazy that the first thinking machine was inspired by a fake parlor trick version of a thinking machine.

The Turk seemed like modernity but turned out to be old magic. But in a way magic was modernity. Magic and machines were all bound up together. Most of the master magicians of the nineteenth century were also watch makers. Both require meticulous planning and mechanical ingenuity to build intricate, tiny, things. They would take the latest engineering and apply it to magic. And vice-versa: developing a certain illusion would lead to engineering breakthroughs.

How did you get started in magic?

I grew up in Dallas, and I hung around a local magic shop called Douglas Magic Land. Every Saturday we would go down there and meet the local magicians. And there was a one particular guy on TV locally, Mark Wilson. And I started working with him afternoons and weekends.

Did you perform with him?

I realized early on I wasn’t a great performer. I used to do birthday parties around the neighborhood. That was about the extent of it for me. Nowadays I do the Turk, and some of these automata pieces at the Magic Castle.

Was there a point where you realized: “I’m not going to be a magic performer but a magic builder”?

My younger sister used to always tell me things like “hey, you’re never gonna make it!” But I always liked to build things, and tear stuff apart and find out how it worked. So I set up a little shop with Mark Wilson to build his equipment. And that worked out well. When he came to Los Angeles for television in the late 60s, I came with him.

And at a certain point you struck out on your own?

Right.