Marking time

Johann Nepomuk Maelzel invented weird and wonderful devices, but none were more successful than the metronome

- Misha Donat

Following his victory over the Austrian army at the Battle of Wagram on 5-6 July 1809, Napoleon established his Viennese headquarters at the palace of Schönbrunn. Many entertainments were put on for his benefit over the next few months, and among those who displayed their talents before the French Emperor was an inventor called Johann Nepomuk Maelzel. The recent battle had been particularly costly in terms of the dead and wounded, and Napoleon was impressed by the artificial limbs designed by Maelzel. He asked the inventor to come up with a collapsible cart that could be used to transport the wounded from the battlefield - and Maelzel readily agreed. But knowing of Napoleon's interests away from the fighting, he mentioned a machine he could already demonstrate to him.

This was no less than a chess-playing automaton named the 'Turk', after the life-size model of a turban-clad figure who sat at it. The invention wasn't actually Maelzel's own, though he was happy enough to take the credit for it: it had been built by an official in Empress Maria Theresa's entourage named Wolfgang von Kempelen, who caused a sensation when he first displayed it in 1770. Following Kempelen's death in 1804 Maelzel purchased the machine from his son, and made various refinements to it. The world's first chess computer was eventually revealed to be an elaborate hoax containing a live player cunningly concealed within its depths - but not before Napoleon had played against it and attempted unsuccessfully to fool it by executing some illegal moves.