FEATURE BY EMILY COOK
“I like the idea of clockwork”, said Steven Moffat, the writer of The Girl in the Fireplace, in 2006. “I like the idea of the ‘tick-tock, tick-tock’ – broken clocks and all that creepiness; a children’s-story creepiness of a clockwork man that makes that noise. There was a clockwork man around at that time [in the 1700s]: a clockwork chess player.”
This clockwork chess player was a crude kind of robot that originated in Vienna in 1769, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Hungarian engineer and inventor Wolfgang Von Kempelen created an ‘Automaton Chess Player’ – later known as ‘the Turk’ – for Empress Maria Theresa. In 1770 he unveiled it to her at Schönbrunn Palace, the Habsburg court in Vienna, in the presence of Venetian noblemen and scientists.