Potpourri

Some wonders lay hidden beneath the earth, while others are taken on a grand tour of Europe and America. Join us today for two new curiosities to explore.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. The cow had disappeared

(00:29):
right before his eyes. It was March of and young
Amile for a dawn, was standing in the field that
he worked with his father in the small village of
Glausel in central France. It was just by chance that
he'd been looking in the right direction at all. The
cow had been standing there one minute and next well,
it was gone. Emil ran over to the spot where

(00:52):
the cow had vanished from and discovered the reason why.
There was a large hole in the ground. It had
chosen that very moment open wide and had dropped out
beneath the cow like a trap door in a Scooby
Doo cartoon. Of course, their first priority was to get
the cow back out, and that took a bit of time.
Cows are heavy, after all, and they have a tendency

(01:13):
to kick and fight. But they eventually managed to free
the fallen beast from the pit, and that's when they
got a good look at what was down there, and
it baffled them. They could see bricks. Neat tidy rows
of uniform bricks were visible in the soil and roots
below the surface of the field, so Emil grabbed the
shovel and began to dig around them. Soon enough, he

(01:35):
and his father were standing in a small chamber with
walls of brick and tiled floor, and there were objects inside.
Word quickly spread. A local teacher visited the farm and
alerted the government to the discovery. Local scholars began to
flock to the farm for their chance in helping with
the excavation. Over the next five years, the dig site

(01:57):
was extended, eventually revealing a number of chambers, each with
their own collection of artifacts. That's where things got strange. First,
you have to remember that no one knew these chambers
were there in the field until the cow had fallen
through the ceiling of one of the rooms. But they
were an odd collection of items that made that difficult

(02:17):
to believe. Yes, while some of the items in the
chamber dated back to the first century, others were much newer,
possibly as recent as the fifteenth century. There has been
a lot of controversy about the discovery over the years.
Emil was accused of forging the entire site, but that
claim was finally dismissed in court. More modern tools in

(02:39):
the last couple of decades have allowed scientists to determine
the true age of some of the oldest pottery there,
dating back roughly two thousand years. There are bone fragments
from the thirteenth century and ceramic tablets with Phoenician writing
on them. It's like a potpourri of archaeological clues, making
it very difficult to nail down exactly when the chambers

(03:00):
were built. And none of that even comes close to
the biggest question of all. Why Why was this set
of chambers constructed? Why did someone want to gather up
so many of these seemingly disparate items and store them
all in one place, And why were they hidden away,
buried beneath the surface of a field in the middle

(03:21):
of France. Nearly a century later. The answer is the
same as it's always been. We just don't know. They

(03:44):
built a machine that could play chess. Now I understand
that's not exactly earth shattering news. We live in an
era where Deep Blue from IBM and Alpha zero from
Deep Mind can be just about any opponent placed in
front of them clearly. Artificial intelligence has grown by leaps
and bounds, allowing us to pack more and more power

(04:05):
into the devices we use each day. But this wasn't
a sleek, modern processor fueled brain. It was a wooden
box and a mechanical dummy. They called it the Turk,
and it was built in Vienna around seventeen seventy. Think
of it like a large wooden chest four ft long,
two ft wide and about three ft tall. Hefty for sure,

(04:27):
but it served as a desk upon which a chessboard sat,
and behind that desk stood the Turk himself. Well him
might be stretching it. The Turk was a mechanical man,
an automaton if you want to be technical about it,
and this eighteenth century robot could play chess. The man
who invented it was Barren Wolfgang von Kemperlin, an inventor

(04:49):
from Hungary who was born in seventeen thirty four. Armed
with this amazing device, he traveled all across Europe, pitting
his invention against the best chess players he could find.
He would begin each match by opening all of the
cabinet doors beneath the desktops, so everyone gathered could see
his brilliant mechanical engineering, firsthand gears and cogs and drums

(05:13):
and levers, all of it served to power the Turk
as it picked up chess pieces and made move after
move against the humans who chose to play it, and
most of the time the robot one. It said that
the Turk defeated Napoleon, Benjamin Franklin, even Empress Catherine the
First of Russia. It was so popular that after von

(05:34):
Kempelin died in eighteen o four, the Turk was sold
to a Bavarian musician who carried on the constant touring
in the eighteen twenties. That tour included America. In fact,
the author Edgar Allen Poe watched one of these demonstrations
himself in eighteen thirty six, and then went on to
write an article about it in a periodical called The

(05:54):
Southern Literary Messenger, which is ironic because just a few
years later the Turk would be purchased by Postoned physician
John Circely Mitchell. All told the Turk was a source
of entertainment and delight for nearly seventy years and inspired
a lot of questions and a lot of wonder which
I have to admit, is still pretty attractive today. The

(06:16):
fact that someone built a mechanical device over two d
and fifty years ago that could play chess and beat humans, well,
it sounds like something out of a Jewels Verne novel,
and yet it happened, well sort of. You see, there
are enough drawings and firsthand accounts of how the device
operated to hint at the true power of the robot.

(06:38):
Thanks to magnets in the base of each chess piece
and corresponding metal balls in the inside surface of the
chess board, it was possible for a person to watch
the game unfold and then operate the robot like a
puppet as the game moved along. Sadly, the Turk was
destroyed in a museum fire in July of eighteen fifty four.

(06:59):
It and that happened the physical proof of its trickery
literally went up in smoke. Still, it's hard not to
see our modern world reflected in that eighteenth century invention.
In the pursuit of progress and entertainment, we still try
our best to cram as much power as possible into
our devices. At least we've stopped using live humans to

(07:22):
do it. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of
the Cabinet of Curiosities, subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast
dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky
in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award

(07:44):
winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series,
and television show, and you can learn all about it
over at the World of Lore dot com. And until
next time, stay curious.