Wolfgang von Kempelen

Biography

In 1770 a chess automaton was brought to the court of Maria Theresa: a human figure in a turban and Turkish robes sat behind a large cabinet with a chessboard on top. The machine played a strong game and beat almost everyone. It was made by a court official, who later said it was only a trick.

His name was Wolfgang von Kempelen.

He was born on 23 January 1734 in Pressburg (now Bratislava), then the capital of the Kingdom of Hungary within the Habsburg domains, the youngest of the children of Engelbert Kempelen and Anna Theresa Spindler. He studied philosophy and law in Pressburg, then in Győr, Vienna and Rome; mathematics and physics also interested him. Besides German, Hungarian and the Slavic languages he knew Latin, French and Italian, and during his travels in England and his service in the Banat he learned a little English and Romanian. In 1755 he applied for his first position at court, in the Hungarian Court Chamber in Pressburg. Then came the steps up: secretary (1757), Councillor of the Court Chamber (1764), Director of Salt Mining (1765), Second Commissioner of the commission for the organisation of the Banat (1769), and finally Imperial-Royal Court Councillor (1787). The sources differ in small details, but his official career is better documented than anything else in his life.

His service gave him occasions for engineering. In 1770 he built a pontoon bridge at Pressburg. He took part in moving the university from Trnava to Buda Castle and oversaw the building of the Court Theatre in the former Carmelite monastery in Buda; the theatre opened on 25 October 1790. According to various accounts, he worked on the water supply of Buda and of Pressburg Castle, and in 1780 he made the famous fountains at Schönbrunn. He built steam engines and water pumps. In 1788–1789 he patented a steam turbine for mills. For the blind Viennese pianist Maria Theresia von Paradis, an acquaintance of Mozart, he made a typewriter (1779).

He was also an artist and etcher, wrote poems and epigrams, and composed a singspiel, “Andromeda and Perseus”, which was performed in Vienna. Documents have left us almost nothing on the first two activities; I would not venture to judge the quality of his etchings.

Kempelen married twice. His first wife, Maria Franziska Piani, died in 1758, a year after the wedding. From 1762 he was married to Maria Anna von Gobelius, who had earlier served as a lady’s companion in the house of Count Johannes Erdődy. Of the five children of the second marriage, two lived to adulthood: a daughter, Maria Theresia (1768–1812), and a son, Karl (1771–1822).

The Turk was simple and cunning. The cabinet hid a strong chess player, who moved the figure’s arm with levers, while spectators were shown empty compartments. For decades the automaton toured Europe and the Americas and won most of its games. Its opponents are said to have included Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. The accounts of games against Frederick II and Napoleon differ in detail, and the record of one game is linked with a meeting in 1809. The automaton burned in Philadelphia on 5 July 1854.

Kempelen’s second undertaking proved more durable. For about twenty years he studied speech and built an apparatus that reproduced the voice by means of bellows, valves and pipes and was operated by hand. He published the result in Vienna: “Mechanismus der menschlichen Sprache nebst der Beschreibung seiner sprechenden Maschine” (“The Mechanism of Human Speech, with a Description of His Speaking Machine”, 1791; the first edition is sometimes dated 1789). The detailed description later made it possible to rebuild the apparatus: in 2007 it was reconstructed by the German researchers Fabian Brackhane and Dominik Bauer, and earlier still, in 2001, by the Hungarian phoneticians Péter Nikléczy and Gábor Olaszy. An early example, possibly an original, can be seen in the musical instruments section of the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

He retired from service in 1798, after forty-three years. The story that the emperor left him destitute probably arose from confusion over his several pensions. Maria Theresa had granted him an annual pension of 1,000 ducats in 1771; under Joseph II the court officials’ benefits were sharply cut, and his supplementary pension was revoked in 1781. On retirement he was granted a pension equal to his last salary, 5,000 gulden. In 1802 he petitioned Francis II to repay 20,000 gulden of expenses incurred in the service of the crown, and was refused.

Kempelen died on 26 March 1804 in his apartment in the Viennese suburb of Alservorstadt. He kept his country estate at Gomba near Pressburg to the end.