Wolfgang von Kempelen

Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734 to 1804) was an engineer, inventor and writer born in Pressburg, today's Bratislava, then the capital of the Kingdom of Hungary within the Habsburg Empire. He built a long career as a civil servant at the Habsburg court, rising to Imperial-Royal Court Councillor, and oversaw the building of the court theatre in Buda. He is best remembered for The Turk, a chess-playing automaton presented to Maria Theresa in 1770 that was in fact a hoax, because a human chess master hidden in the cabinet worked it with levers, and for a manually operated speaking machine, described in his 1789 book on the mechanism of human speech. He also constructed steam engines, water pumps, a pontoon bridge in Pressburg, the fountains at Schönbrunn, patented a steam turbine for mills, and made a typewriter for the blind pianist Maria Theresia von Paradis.