Clockwork Game: The Illustrious Career of a Chessplaying Automaton

Description

• In 1769, the court of Empress Maria Theresia witnessed one of that era’smost amazing feats of engineering: a machine that could play chess. Artfullyconstructed by a Hungarian nobleman named Wolfgang von Kempelen, thechess-machine played a unique game against each opponent, far surpassing theabilities of all its fellow automata. Throughout its eighty-five year career, audiences across Europe and the Americas flocked to see the mechanical marvelseemingly capable of human intelligence; Napoleon, Charles Babbage, and BenjaminFranklin were among its challengers, and Edgar Allen Poe wrote an essayattempting to explain how it worked. Despite its demise over a hundred fiftyyears ago, its mystery continues to fascinate, and its audience’s reaction toits Orientalist trappings casts fresh light on our present sense of the’exotic’.
• Written and Illustrated by Jane Irwin, author of the V�geleingraphic novels, Clockwork Game retells the true story of the world’sfirst chess-playing automaton, blending reality and fiction into a singulargraphic novel.