“I’m fascinated with how primitive the human mind still is. It can be misdirected so easily.”

The Android Clarinetist was the poster child for a massive 2001 exhibition at the Getty Center titled Devices of Wonder. Gaughan appreciated the opportunity to introduce the public to several of his own wonderful devices, including a re-creation of a famous robot named The Turk, who played chess against the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte and Ben Franklin and was written up by Edgar Allan Poe.

The Turk was built in 1770 by Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen. Then the world’s most advanced automaton, The Turk drew huge crowds as it toured Europe and America. To satisfy doubting Thomases, von Kempelen would open the machine to reveal a system of gears and levers resembling a wristwatch’s grand complication. Of course, The Turk turned out to be a hoax anyway: a human chess master hid inside the cabinet. In 1854, The Turk was destroyed in a fire and instantly became the stuff of legend. A century later, engravings of the machine reprinted in magic magazines caught Gaughan’s attention. “I kept asking myself how they hid a full-size person in there with all the gears and levers?” Gaughan recalls. “So I decided to rebuild it.” Twenty years, three prototypes, and more than a few dollars later, Gaughan’s Turk is a near-perfect re-creation of von Kempelen’s. He even replicated the original Turk’s chessboard that wasn’t caught in the blaze. The reborn Turk is a marvel to behold, but even a close examination begs the question that captured Gaughan’s imagination: how does a person fit inside the box with all the mechanics? When asked, Gaughan doesn’t miss a beat.

“You’ve got to keep some of the magic alive,” he says with a wry smile.

MAKE Editor-at-large David Pescovitz is co-editor of boing boing.net and a research director at Institute for the Future.

36 Make: Volume 13