The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (42 page)

At the end of the game the Turk had nearly always emerged victorious, even against some of the strongest chess players in the world. Audiences were mystified. Could the Turk really be, as the entire performance suggested, a thinking machine? And if not, were the Turk’s moves secretly controlled by its creator? Or did the cabinet, seemingly filled with machinery, instead conceal a person inside it—a small child, or a dwarf, or even (according to one of the more outlandish notions) a chess-playing monkey?

The Turk was an immediate sensation, but over time Kempelen grew uncomfortable at being so closely identified with his remarkable creation (he had, he believed, more important work still to accomplish), and the

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Turk’s performances grew more sporadic. Eventually Kempelen dismantled it, and for many years nothing more was heard of the chess-playing automaton—until 1809, when Kempelen’s son sold its disassembled com-ponents to a Bavarian engineer named Johann Nepomuk Maelzel.

Maelzel was a distinguished engineer and brilliant inventor, but his even greater talent was as a showman. For years he toured the Continent, exhibiting the Turk in London, Paris, Amsterdam, even, it has been said, arranging a game against Napoleon. He was, however, a man of expensive tastes, and his debts began to pile up. When those debts were compounded by lawsuits, he set sail in 1826 for the United States, where he and his celebrated chess player toured for more than a decade. Their appearances were confined mostly to large cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, but in December 1835 the Turk played a short engagement in Richmond, Virginia, where on numerous occasions the audience included Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe never played against the Turk himself, preferring to remain unseen among the crowd, a slight, serious-looking figure carefully studying the Turk’s operations, scrutinizing Maelzel’s every move. In the April 1836

issue of the
Southern Literary Messenger
he published an essay entitled

“Maelzel’s Chess-Player,” in which he boldly claimed to have solved the mystery.

By this time the Turk had been the subject of a great deal of learned speculation, going back at least to 1789, when Joseph Friedrich, Freiherr zu Racknitz, wrote a book that concluded—correctly—that the automaton’s moves must be controlled by an operator hidden inside the cabinet.

The breakthrough moment came in 1821, with the publication of an anonymous pamphlet (its author was a twenty-year-old Cambridge un-dergraduate named Robert Willis) entitled
An Attempt to Analyse the Automaton Chess Player of Mr. De Kempelen, with an Easy Method of
Imitating the Movements of that Celebrated Figure.
Willis carefully explained how the cabinet was actually larger than it appeared to be, large enough for a normal-size man to be concealed inside it; he also provided illustrations that demonstrated the positions the man would have to assume to remain hidden as each of the several cabinet doors was opened.

The pamphlet was reviewed later that year in the
Edinburgh Philosophical Journal,
among the editors of which was Sir David Brewster (the same David Brewster whom Richard Adams Locke put to work inventing the hydro-oxygen telescope with John Herschel). In his 1832 book
Letters on

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Monck Mason’s Flying Machine

Natural Magic
Brewster himself wrote a lengthy analysis of the chess-playing automaton, though it was little more than a gloss on Willis’s previous work. Just as Brewster had relied heavily on Willis, so did Poe rely heavily on Brewster in his explanation of the Turk’s operations. And much as he had in his appendix to “Hans Phaall,” with its slighting remarks about earlier stories of lunar voyages (some of which he had drawn from for his own story), Poe acknowledged his debt by disparagement: Brewster’s analysis, he claimed, was “very cursory and inattentive.”

Poe’s discussion begins with the assertion that the Turk cannot be a calculating machine because a single chess game provides far too many potential positions. As all of the theories about how Maelzel himself might control the moves are fatally flawed, the only reasonable conclusion is

“that when the machine is first rolled into the presence of the spectators, a man is already within it.” Poe explains to the reader how the deception is accomplished, with the man concealed in various partitions inside the cabinet as Maelzel opens each successive door. His reasoning, he claims, is founded on seventeen observations made during visits to the exhibition in Richmond: the dimensions of the cabinet are sufficient for a man to lie inside it; the interior of the cabinet is lined with cloth, presumably to deaden any sounds emanating from inside; the Turk’s adversary does not sit at the board, but is seated some distance away; and so forth.

Little of Poe’s study was new, and it did not culminate in a solution different from the one Willis had earlier proposed. Still, unlike his critique of Locke’s moon story, Poe’s essay on the automaton chess player was received with widespread interest; the
Charleston Courier,
for instance, called it “highly ingenious,” while in Philadelphia, the
United States
Gazette
said it was “the most successful attempt we have seen to explain the
modus operandi
of that wonderful production.” The reason for the praise lies less in
what
Poe wrote than in
how
he wrote it. Poe had criticized earlier analyses of the automaton chess player for not providing sufficient evidence to prove their claims, and in his essay he employed a very different approach. After first stating the problem (he provides a long, vivid description of the Turk’s performance), he then examines its elements, bringing the reader along step by step as he ticks off his seventeen clues, none decisive in itself but each one narrowing the field of possibilities, moving ever closer to the answer, until by the end he has demonstrated that his is the only logical solution. It was a highly effective dramatic structure, and one that Poe would later put to brilliant use in his
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detective fiction, the stories featuring C. Auguste Dupin, master ratiocina-tor, who solved crimes purely by the force of observation and deduction.

The original detective, though, had been Poe himself, and the subject of the investigation not a murder but a hoax.

Johann Nepomuk Maelzel never responded to any theory about the Turk’s operation; the true showman, he understood, prefers to cultivate an air of mystery. That was just one of the many lessons he imparted to the young promoter who had arrived in Boston in the fall of 1835 with his own curious attraction in tow. The Turk had been performing in the main ballroom of the city’s Concert Hall, but the crowds coming to see the new exhibition soon grew so large that Maelzel was asked to move to a smaller room next door. Eventually, though, the crowds for the new exhibition began to fall off and the young showman—P. T. Barnum—had to find a way to revive public interest.

Soon he set into motion a plan he had devised while watching Maelzel exhibit the Turk. He surreptitiously planted stories in the local papers revealing that what appeared to be a very old woman was in fact “a curiously constructed automaton made up of whalebone, india-rubber, and numberless springs ingeniously put together, and made to move at the slightest touch, according to the whim of the operator.” Joice Heth, Barnum now claimed, was not a human being at all.

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c h a p t e r
15

“Joice Heth

Is Not Dead”

Little by little P. T. Barnum was learning his trade. It was Barnum himself, in September 1835, who induced Johann Nepomuk Maelzel to move the Turk to a smaller room in Boston’s Concert Hall (presumably he paid Maelzel to do so) because the crowds coming to see Joice Heth were too large for the room. Eventually, though, the crowds began to thin out. That was the natural ebb and flow of show business, as predictable as the tides and about as impervious to resistance; when the people stopped coming, the showman simply moved on to the next engagement.

This time, however, was different.

One day a letter appeared in a Boston newspaper that put forward the astonishing claim that Joice Heth was an automaton, her motions controlled by an unseen operator, her words spoken by the ventriloquist promoter who always stood at her side. The letter was signed “A Visitor,” and its authorship has never been conclusively determined, but Barnum’s finger-prints are all over it. It would hardly be the only fake letter he ever planted in a newspaper, and this one—so clearly inspired by his observations of Maelzel and the Turk—suited his purposes precisely. As he remarked in his autobiography, “The consequence was, our audience again largely increased.” Bostonians who had not yet attended the exhibition rushed to Concert Hall to see for themselves the workings of the ingeniously crafted automaton; those who had already attended came back again to determine if this new claim could be true, and if so, how they had been so thoroughly deceived. With careful attention they listened to the voice that might or
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might not be hers; felt for the beating of a pulse created either by heart or mechanical pump; watched the narrow chest rise and fall in sleep, hiding inside it lungs or bellows; stroked the rough, wrinkled brown flesh that might be nothing more than India rubber. The people pressed around Joice Heth more thickly than ever before, and as they scrutinized her Barnum eyed them just as closely, listened to them debate among themselves, noting to himself how many were coming back again to get another look.

After completing the exhibition at Concert Hall, Barnum and his assistant Levi Lyman bundled up Joice Heth and set out on the road again.

They traveled west across Massachusetts, made their way down into Connecticut, and then finally, in October 1835, arrived again in New York, where Joice Heth was scheduled to reprise her engagement at Niblo’s Garden. By then they had been touring for nearly two months, often staying in a town for no more than a few days before packing up and moving on.

The travel was difficult and exhausting, but Joice Heth never missed a performance. When the doors opened at nine, she was there on her couch, still telling her tales of “little George,” still gazed upon by a parade of strangers, some of them moved to tears by her, some laughing, others shamelessly pointing. The shows went on six hours a day, six days a week; Joice Heth had only Sundays free from public display.

Her second engagement at Niblo’s overlapped with the annual fair of the American Institute of the City of New York, designed to show off the latest products being turned out by the city’s factories and workshops.

The eight-day fair drew as many as a hundred thousand visitors from all over the country, who wandered through the hall marveling at the more than ten thousand specimens of New York industry—plated candlesticks and embossed card racks and artificial flowers, air-spring beds and cooking stoves, steam engines and waterwheels. Drawing the largest and most enthusiastic crowds were the scores of new machines, emblems of the limitless future: washing machines, threshing machines, machines for cutting straw and grinding apples and extracting stumps, for pressing hats and knitting cotton stockings. Many of the fair’s visitors, having taken in all they could, then strolled across Niblo’s sculpted garden into Joice Heth’s viewing room, where they encountered what might have been (they could not say for sure) the most wondrous machine of all, one that could talk and laugh and sing hymns.

At the end of October, Joice Heth began a weeklong exhibition upstate at the Albany Museum, where the evening performers included an Italian

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“Joice Heth Is Not Dead”

calling himself Signor Antonio. As an entertainer Antonio was something of a jack-of-all-trades—he could, for instance, hit a target with a musket shot while jumping up and down on a single stilt—but his special gift was for spinning plates and bowls; in one of his more spectacular routines he spun ten dinner plates simultaneously on sticks balanced on various parts of his body. P. T. Barnum had never seen a crockery spinner before, and he was entranced. By the end of his week in Albany he had signed Antonio to a year-long contract—having first obtained the proviso that he change his stage name to “Signor Vivalla,” as Barnum did not believe that “Antonio” sounded sufficiently foreign.

So the showman and his two performers, the slave and the immigrant, returned once more to New York City. Rather than pursue another engagement at Niblo’s (he probably thought he had reached a point of diminishing returns there), Barnum instead headed east, into the Bowery.

The Bowery was quickly earning a reputation as the workingman’s Broadway, a boisterous promenade bursting with theaters, music halls, gambling dens, brothels, and—unique among New York’s avenues—not a single church. Barnum booked Joice Heth into a hall at the corner of Bowery and Division, but little is known about this exhibition, because by now he was devoting most of his attention to his newer attraction, whose extravagant routines he believed would especially appeal to Bowery audiences. He called first on the manager of the Franklin Theater, William Dinneford. Dinneford was dubious about the act of Signor Vivalla, saying that he had seen similar feats executed by others.

“Mr. Dinneford, I beg your pardon,” Barnum replied, “but I must be permitted to say that you are mistaken. You have no doubt seen strange things in your life, but my dear sir, I should never have imported Signor Vivalla from Italy, unless I had authentic evidence that he was the only artist of the kind who ever left that country.”

For the rest of that week and part of the next, Barnum appeared nightly onstage as Vivalla’s assistant, arranging his plates, carrying his stilts, handing him his muskets, and addressing the audience on his behalf (although Signor Vivalla had spent several years living in England, Barnum thought that the overall effect would be destroyed if he were heard speaking English). The act was received so enthusiastically that when the engagement at the Franklin was completed Barnum entrusted Joice Heth to his assistant Levi Lyman, and accompanied Signor Vivalla to a booking in Washington.