Magyar News, 2002. szeptember-2003. augusztus (13. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

2002-10-01 / 2. szám

of extraordinary ingenuity were being constructed and exhibited across Europe, including Jacques de Vaucanson’s mechanical duck, Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz’s harpsichord player and John Joseph Merlin’s dancing lady.

Kempelen next took The Turk to London, at that time a center for chess and also renowned for public displays of technical marvels. The Turk went on show in Savile Row and was a great success.

A year later, Kempelen returned to Vienna, packed The Turk away into wooden crates and turned his attention to other inventions, such as an ambitious attempt to build a machine capable of imitating the human voice. This wonder can be seen in the halls of the Millennial Exhibition of Hungarian achievement in the former Ganz factory territory behind the Mammut II shopping mall. He also devised a writing machine for the blind.

When Kempelen died in Vienna in March 1804, The Turk was sold to John Nepomuk Maelzel, an engineer and musician who wanted to make money from displaying the automaton to a curious public.

The Turk’s most famous encounter during this period came in 1809, when it was shown to Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon tried to trick the automaton by deliberately cheating, but The Turk was

not fooled and upset the board rather than beat him. Napoleon’s valet Louis-Constant Wairy wrote: "The Emperor complimented it highly."

In London in 1819 the computing pioneer Charles Babbage saw The Turk play. The following year, he challenged it to a game. He wrote, "Played with the automaton. Automaton won in about an hour."

Maelzel also took the Turk to the United States where the author Edgar Allan Poe was so intrigued by the ‘Automaton Chess Player’ that he published a lengthy thesis containing his own theories on how it worked.

"Perhaps no exhibition of the kind has ever elicited so general attention as the chess player of Maelzel. Wherever seen it has been an object of intense curiosity, to all persons who think. Yet the question of its modus operandi is still undetermined," wrote Poe, noting also that The Turk played with his left hand, a matter Poe considered highly significant.

The secret of The Turk was finally revealed in January 1857 in an account written by Silas Mitchell, whose father Dr John Mitchell had bought the automaton when Maelzel died in 1838, to satisfy his own curiosity.

The answer? A person was concealed inside the cabinet. The clockwork machinery visible on its left-hand side extended only a third of the way along, so that the covert player could hide behind it, then slide along to the other end for the remainder of the demonstration. The human chess wizard would play by the light of a small candle, whose smoke was dispersed up a pipe to an aperture in the top of The Turk’s turban.

The operator watched a chessboard in front of him and moved a metal pointer which was connected to The Turk’s arm using a system of levers to move the corresponding piece on the external board. An ingenious system of magnets helped the operator follow the opponent’s moves.

Kempelen probably used a series of operators in this elaborate trick, but one thing is certain, all were strong players, taking on some of Europe’s finest chess masters and losing to only the very best.

Interest waned in The Turk once its secret was discovered and Mitchell sold the automaton to the Chinese Museum in Philadelphia. Some years later there was a fire at the museum and The Turk was totally destroyed. The loss is substantial as there will never be another marvel quite like it.

By courtesy of The Budapest Sun

* ^ ^ statistics on Hungary’s Population

THE WINNER IS: HUNGARIAN CHERRY

A cold snap killed off most of the cherries in Michigan but one strain survived - hearty Hungarian Cherries! Dr. Amy Iezzoni of Michigan State University went behind the then "Iron Curtan" and discovered the cherries that Hungarians had been eating for years. This breed of cherry recently made it to the United States.

Dr. Amy Iezzoni traveled to Hungary in 1983 on a US Department of Agriculture grant. Iezzoni's job in Michigan was to develop better cherry trees. She felt it was necessary to go to the source of the evolution and domestication of the tart cherry. After registering with the police she began to explore the cherry orchards. This was the first time an American had come to see Hungarian cherry tree breeders. Iezzoni found, to her great surprise, that these terrific tart cherries had not made there way to the west because western scientists - who might have been interested in cherries - had not ever bothered to travel behind the iron curtain.

The 1983 adventure took her to most of Eastern Europe. She found the best cherries in Hungary. There were wonderful types growing in the villages and the breeders had made interesting crosses to create an exciting variation.

According to Dr. Iezzoni, "I went back and forth to Hungary many times. It required a lot of trust on the part of the Hungarian breeders to let the University and me handle their intellectual property. When we got to the negotiation phase Hungary was in a transition and Eastern Europeans were being taken advantage of by others from the west."

The cherries are being marketed as "Balaton Cherries" after the Balaton Lake in Hungary. They currently make up approximately 3% of the cherry market in Michigan. The Balaton tree flowers survived the Michigan cold snap when the standard American Cherries did not.

The American Hungarian Foundation on 300 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ. held the First Annual Hungarian Qierry Festival at the end of July in the Museum Courtyard.

The numbers we have obtained from the Hungarian News Agency show that the decline in the population has slowed as a result of fewer deaths and slightly more births over the first 10 months of last year, the Central Statistics Office told MTI.

The 0.3% rise in the number of births and a 4.9% drop in mortality brought the population decline down to 3.1 per thousand from 3.8 per thousand a year ago.

Preliminary data show there were more than 81,000 births and some 108,000 deaths in January-October 2001. The number of births was higher than last year in six and fewer in four of these 10 months. Three hundred more babies were born by the end of October than the same time last year.

Mortality decreased mainly in the first half of the year. There were some 5,500 fewer deaths in the first TO months of the year, when the population declined by 26,000, a drop of nearly 6,000, or 18%>, on the year before.

The number of live births per 1,000 of the population was 9.8 and that of deaths 12.9 in January-October, 0.1 per thousand more and 0.6 per thousand less than in the same period of the previous year.

The number of businesses rose by nearly 18,000 to 805,545 in the first quarter of 2002, the Central Statistical Office (CSO) said on Friday.

The number of businesses run by self-employed persons rose by more than 7,500 and the number of businesses in other categories increased by 10,000.

In the same quarter last year, the number of businesses increased by 27,500 to 870,657, including a 14,500 rise in the number of businesses run by self-employed persons.

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