Karl Gottlieb von Windisch Publishes Inanimate Reason

We've been trying to make human-like machines for centuries.

In 1783 Karl Gottlieb von Windisch published letters describing exactly such a thing: a chess-playing automaton built by his friend Wolfgang von Kempelen for the Habsburg court in the decade prior. The machine, a life-size figure in Turkish dress seated at a cabinet, beat many challengers across Europe. Windisch's book, issued in German and French immediately and in English the next year as Inanimate Reason, praised it without claiming to know how it worked: “'Tis a deception! granted; but such an one as does honor to human nature.”

The deception was apparently a strong human player hidden inside, which Edgar Allan Poe argued in his 1836 essay “Maelzel's Chess-Player.”