THE FIRST CHESS MACHINE
A true( albeit limited) chess machine finally made an appearance just before World War I. A brilliant inventor named Leonardo Torres y Quevedo was cranking out amazing devices at a furious clip. He invented improved dirigible airships, remote control torpedoes, primitive radio control devices, numerous calculating machines, and a famous cable car which is still in use in Niagara Falls, Canada. I visited Niagara Falls in 2002, and just as my family was about to step into the famed Aerocar, a sudden thunderstorm came up and we weren ' t allowed to make the trip over the famous Niagara whirlpool. I did, however, get to loudly and publicly bug out when I saw Torres y Quevedo ' s name on the historical marker. I started yelling,“ He ' s the guy! That ' s the guy who made the first working chess computer!” My family thought I ' d lost my mind, until they read the whole marker( which confirmed what I ' d said). So instead of riding the Aerocar, we sat indoors during the storm and I told my chess player sons about Torres y Quevedo ' s“ miracle machine”.
He built the device sometime around 1912, and it appeared in a famous public exhibition in 1914. It appears as a simple well-made wooden table with a chess board on top. The machine can ' t play a full game of chess; instead it can play a simple King and Rook vs. King endgame, but it always find a path to mate. It moved the pieces via a mechanical arm; magnets under the board allowed the machine to sense the opponent ' s move( which had to be made by sliding the King from square to square). The machine, electrically operated, could even speak the words“ check” and“ mate”( using a gramophone record which was part of the device). There were a few problems with Torres y Quevedo ' s machine, in that the White pieces had to start on specific squares, and the machine couldn ' t always deliver mate within the fifty moves stipulated by the laws of chess. But it stands as an amazing engineering triumph: the first operational chess“ computer”( and it still works today!).
SUPER-SCIENCE GIVES US THE MODERN COMPUTER
Nothing will spur scientific research and development like an old-fashioned war. The Second World War, the most horrific event in human history, drove scientists and governments to frenzied research in a number of fields of“ super science” which, just a few years before, had been relegated to the pages of science fiction stories. Although quite a few ideas came up a bust, numerous fantastic plans bore fruit, giving us technology which we often take for granted today: radar, jet engines, space flight, atomic energy, and computers.
Although several scientists and researchers had experimented with digital computers before the war( most notably Germany ' s Konrad Zuse), it took the war itself to drive the development of the computer to a form re-
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