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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