My dad loved to tinker and he loved Popular Mechanics.

They used to run articles on their latest big project as features, then sell plans for the project for a small price.

One such project was the URBO CAR: two-stroke engine, 60 miles a gallon.

Dad got excited and sent for the plans.

For months, the arc welder in the basement crackled as he welded the giant frame of the Urbo Car. It was huge!

One day I asked him

“How are we going to get this out of the basement, dad?”

The look I received is fodder for stories.

PHILOSTRATE  Here, mighty Theseus!  

THESEUS  Say, what abridgement have you for this evening?     What masque? what music? How shall we beguile The lazy time, if not with some delight..

PHILOSTRATE  There is a brief how many sports are ripe:     Make choice of which your highness will see first.    

THESEUS 

Reads   By an Athenian eunuch to the harp.'     We'll none of that: that have I told my love,   In glory of my kinsman Hercules.

Reads   'The riot of the tipsy Bacchanals,     Tearing the Thracian singer in their rage.'     That is an old device; and it was play'd     When I from Thebes came last a conqueror.    

Reads     'The thrice three Muses mourning for the death  Of Learning, late deceased in beggary.'     That is some satire, keen and critical,     Not sorting with a nuptial ceremony.

Reads     'A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus     And his love Thisbe; very tragical mirth.'   Merry and tragical! tedious and brief!     That is, hot ice and wondrous strange snow.     How shall we find the concord of this discord?  

PHILOSTRATE  A play there is, my lord, some ten words long,     Which is as brief as I have known a play;  But by ten words, my lord, it is too long,  Which makes it tedious; for in all the play There is not one word apt, one player fitted:     And tragical, my noble lord, it is;     For Pyramus therein doth kill himself.  Which, when I saw rehearsed, I must confess,     Made mine eyes water; but more merry tears   The passion of loud laughter never shed.  

THESEUS  What are they that do play it?  

PHILOSTRATE  Hard-handed men that work in Athens here, Which never labour'd in their minds till now,     And now have toil'd their unbreathed memories   With this same play, against your nuptial.  

THESEUS  And we will hear it!  

PHILOSTRATE  No, my noble lord;  It is not for you: I have heard it over,   and it is nothing, nothing in the world;     Unless you can find sport in their intents,  Extremely stretch'd and conn'd with cruel pain,  To do you service…

THESEUS  I will hear that play;     For never anything can be amiss,  When simpleness and duty tender it.     Go, bring them in: and take your places, ladies.

Your eyes light up as we glide gracefully around.

I love dancing with you.

Your loving smile is the envy of every guy in the room. Heh, those bums.

I love dancing with you.

For one brief moment the loneliness seems to go away.

I love dancing with you.

We make a wonderful couple. Don’t we?

I love dancing with you.

Sure, I’m a brokedown drunken ballplayer with one leg

And you’re a dime-a-dance girl I pay to dance with,

And maybe it’s your job to be so friendly,

But I love dancing with you.

note: the crappy Stinkpad loaner I have seems to have a problem recording sound. Sorry! I'll find a way to get it laid down, even if Mr. Crap has to record it for me.

To a true carnivore, there’s nothing quite like that smell.. that smell of fat dripping onto hot coals..

“I say! Damned decent of James to make this contribution” said Smythe

“cut me a more generous slice, Fanshaw!” complained Basingwell.

Fanshaw belched loudly, and offered up a more generous heaping of sizzling meat.

“Yessir, DAMNED decent..” said Stokes. Spitting out white, delicate bones that made devouring a bit problematic.

“The man was a saint! To Jimmy!”

Hear Hear! To Jimmy! And the excellent feast he contributed!"

They rejoiced, bellying up to Jimmy’s Buffet.

The magnificent gift I received in return.. well.. I’m set for life!, I thought. It was delightful transforming mundane into fabulous. Then I got hungry. And, well, you know the rest.

What will I tell her mother? And yet, she makes a lovely statue, does she not?

The Turk was conceived and constructed in the 18^th century, but I consider it to fit in the steampunk theme nicely for reasons that I hope to make clear.

The Turk was created by an inventor and courtier from the Empire of Austria-Hungary named Wolfgang Von Kemplemen. Von Kemplemen was a sort of proto-steampunk in his own right, being an inveterate tinkerer and inventor of growing reputation working in the service of the Empress Marie Therese. Von Kemplemen was summoned to a court appearance where a French magician named Pelletier was demonstrating conjuring tricks. The exact nature of the performance is unknown, but it is clear that Von Kemplemen was there to consult with the Empress about the nature of Pelletier’s mechanisms. At the end of the performance, the Empress asked Von Kemplemen his opinion of Pelletier’s show. His response formed part of the Turk’s legend:

“Empress, I believe myself capable of constructing a machine, the effect of which would be much more surprising, and deception far more complete, than what we have just witnessed”

This caused a murmur or two, as Von Kemplemen was of the quiet, dependable sort, not much given to “showboating”. The Empress took him up on his offer and offered to provide patronage while he constructed his machine. The results of this challenge would become the Turk.

Before a select gathering in Empress Marie Therese’s court, the Turk made his debut. In appearance, he was a wooden mannequin about the size and shape of a man, clothed in the outlandish garb of a Turkish sorcerer, trimmed in ermine—clothing considered quite fashionable in its day. The mannequin was seated with right arm extended at a large cabinet with doors in the front and rear. As would become part of the Turk’s “routine”, Von Kemplemen first opened the front doors of the cabinet, demonstrating a bewildering array of clockwork mechanisms. Then he would open the rear door of the cabinet, and shine a candle through the cabinet itself, demonstrating that there was no trap door or secret opening. He would then shut the door and wind the Turk up. What happened next shocked the world in 1770, and would continue to do so until the 1840s. The Turk would proceed to play a game of chess. Not just a series of pre programmed moves, but a real game of chess, showing intelligence and even aggression. Marie Therese asked her courtiers to play the Turk, and the Turk proceeded to defeat a highly rated chess player, a Count Cobenzel, who was in the audience, thrashing him handily. The audience was stunned. Here was a machine, it seemed,capable of human thought, playing a game that requires foresight and intelligence to play, yet powered by windup mechanisms!

The Turk became a nine-days wonder. The Empress elevated Von Kemplemen’s station in court, and had him demonstrate the Turk to visiting crowned heads as a form of entertainment. The Turk became famous, and many visiting nobles had an opportunity to play it. Surprisingly, it is reported that the Turk had a very strong game. Gradually,. Turk fever died down and the Turk got disassembled and packed away at Von Kemplemen’s house, where it remained packed away until after the death of the Empress in 1780. The successor to Empress Marie Therese, the Emperor Joseph, desired to show the Turk to some visiting Russian nobility—so out of the closet came the Turk again. Von Kemplemen was acutely aware of the sensitivity of making a good impression on the new Emperor—having lost his patronage and his allowance with the death of Marie Therese. Alas for Von Kemplemen, Emperor Joseph was so entranced with the impression the Turk’s performance made on the Russians that he commanded Von Kemplemen to take the Turk on a tour of major European capitals. Von Kemplemen was not eager to leave his experiments and public works to show off something he always considered a minor achievement, but knowing what side his bread was buttered on, he reluctantly took the Turk to Paris for public exhibition. If anything would suffice to cement the Turk’s growing reputation, it was this trip. Paris was the chess playing capital of the world at that time, with many chess clubs and coffee houses supporting the game over a very wide social strata of the population. It was in Paris that the American Ambassador, Benjamin Franklin (himself a chess enthusiast) played the Turk, and lost. Many people had opportunity to play the Turk at this time (including one of the earliest Grand Masters of the game, Philodor—who won), and it was in Paris that the Turk achieved the height of its popularity. The Turk toured many other European capitals, including London, where it made a particular impression on a young man named Charles Babbage, who went on to envision a machine that could perform calculations like a human. The Turk eventually returned home to acclaim, and was, again, packed away by Von Kemplemen, who passed away in 1804 after serving a succession of Austrian Emperors. Von Kemplemen’s son sold the Turk to a Hungarian showman and inventor named Maelzel. Maelzel made many improvements to the mechanism, including a rudimentary voice box that could utter the phrase “echeque” (check) at the appropriate moment. Maelzel was the showman that Von Kemplemen was not; he willingly toured all over Europe demonstrating his inventions, including the Turk, to a much broader audience than before. One of the Turks’ most famous opponents of this time period was the Emperor Napoleon, who, it is reputed, was so upset about being beaten that he swept the pieces from the board in a fit of pique. Maelzel may have been a showman, but was not skilled with finances. His increasing debts forced him to sell the Turk to Napoleon’s adopted son, the prince Eugene. Eugene, it is said, was so disappointed when he learned the so-called secret of the Turk’s operation that he put it away in a corner of his palace where it languished for some years—when Maelzel offered to buy it back for a tour of America. The prince agreed to “rent” it to Maelzel for a share of the proceeds. Maelzel scampered to the United States to tour with the automaton. No less a personage than a very young Edgar Allan Poe had opportunity to witness the Turk play, and he wrote a pamphlet that postulated how the Turk operated.

Alas, his debts pursued him in the new world as badly as in the old, and when he passed away on tour, his property was sold at public auction, including the Turk. A series of American owners purchased the Turk over the years, until it was tragically consumed in a warehouse fire in 1840.

So, how, then, did the Turk actually work? There were many publications on the subject over the years. The Turk was the favorite subject of many pamphlets, accusations and articles from chess journals over the years. Part of the allure of the Turk is that the original owners, Von Kemplemen and Maelzel, zealously guarded its secrets to add to its mystique. Some individuals suggested that a pair of dwarves were inside the cabinet. One suggested it was a double amputee, as the cabinet was too small to contain a human. Some suggested that the automaton might actually be what it appeared to be—a clockwork chess playing machine. This was the explanation that was always roundly discredited—clockwork mechanisms not having the sophistication to mimic the many sophisticated decisions that went into a chess game. In 1857, long after the Turk was consumed by fire, the son of the last owner of the Turk published what could be considered an authoritative explanation. The Turk actually was operated by a human, cleverly hid inside the cabinet, moving in a carefully choreographed sequence to avoid detection as the showman out front opened cabinet doors to demonstrate that there was “nothing inside”. The Turk’s arm was manipulated by a very sophisticated armature developed by Von Kemplemen, and he played a mirror game of the one in front of the Turk, illuminated by a candle inside the cabinet.

The secret of the Turk may seem somewhat humdrum once it is explained. And yet, there are sufficient reasons to consider this legendary automaton to be worthy of inclusion into the steampunk universe. The clockwork, baroque stylishness of the Turk is grand, ridiculous, overblown, and overengineered.. a steampunk work of art. The Turk’s influence on a young Charles Babbage is also not to be overlooked as well.

In 2008 issue 13 of MAKE magazine featured an article on John Gaughan, a modern day maker of props for magicians. One of his proudest achievements was a fully functioning replica of the Turk, born anew. When asked to explain how a human operator could fit inside the complicated (and small) cabinet, he demurred, saying

“A magician should have a few secrets”…

There you are.

"I love you, Woodrow" she bleets, mouth brimming with EuroCereal.

I grin at her. Carefully, now. Chew with mouth closed, Auntie. We don’t want an accident.

She chews, blank eyes unfocused. Dribble of milk down one side of mouth. Hodgson enters with juice and a red rose on a tray. He is brisk, obsequious. He serves Auntie, slowly raises and glances at me with a look of mingled loathing and hatred. I grin back, pleasantly.

There you are, Auntie. Another Bite?

“I love you, Woodrow”.