Leonardo Torres Quevedo Builds El Ajedrecista, a Chess-Playing Automaton

Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo built the chess-playing automaton, El Ajedrecista (The Chess Player), in 1912 and presented it in Paris in 1914.

Incapable of playing a full game from scratch, the machine played one specific endgame, its own king and rook against a human’s lone king. It could sense the pieces electrically and move its own with a mechanical arm. A 1915 Scientific American account reported Quevedo's claim that “an automaton can do many things that are popularly classed with thought.” A second version, built in 1920, moved the pieces with electromagnets under the board.

This machine would even impact the budding field of cybernetics, when in January 1951 Quevedo's son Gonzalo Torres-Quevedo presented both machines at a Paris conference, where the 1920 machine defeated none other than Norbert Wiener.