I'm a big automaton fan. I had noticed a while back when searching the web that very few games by the Turk, the granddaddy of them all, have been digitalized  and of the few that are, a couple aren't even real. I digitalized the first 10 games of W. Hunneman's book covering an 1820 exhibition by the Turk.

I know many or most folks don't read blogs, so, since I found these games, all played at Pawn&Move odds, interesting in the fact that regardless what White played, the Turk (Mouret) tried to steer the game into the same opening system, I thought I'd post a link to it here for anyone who cares. ---------> click here.

Thanks for doing this - it's easy to miss blog posts unless they happen to rotate to the front page.  Your historical pieces are quite interesting, this one no less.

As an aside, the first person to figure out how it was done (with a concealed operator inside) was Edgar Allan Poe, who did so with pure logic and observation.

     Poe's deductions can be read HERE. He guessed correctly that the automaton was controlled by a human mind and that Schlumberger was possibly that human.  Some of Poe's deductions were off-base.
     Curiously, Poe rationalized, "The Automaton does not invariably win the game. Were the machine a pure machine this would not be the case — it would always win." This was in 1836. 
     In 1834, two years earlier, Mouret (who was the director of the Turk during the exhibition from which W. Hunneman kept the moves) "anonymously" revealed some of the Turk's secrets in "Magazin Pittoresque."