I just finished up reading
The Turk by Tom Standage (briefly mentioned in passing
here) a biography of the chess-playing automaton that toured Europe and later the Americas during the pivotal transition from the 18th to the 19th century. The Automaton was invented as an exercise in national pride by
Wolfgang von Kempelen, who considered it a trifle compared to his experiments with
mechanical speech synthesis. As a celebrity, the automaton had historic encounters with Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon, Beethoven,
Philidor and Charles Babbage, and fictional encounters with the monarchs Catherine the Great, George III and Frederick II. Standage credits it with influencing the development of the
Difference Engine, the power loom, Poe's
mystery stories, and Barnum's
manipulation of the press. The myths surrounding have even caught
James Randi, who seems to have been unaware of a colleague's
reconstruction based on notes from the last owner.
posted by KirkJobSluder
on Sep 21, 2005 -
7 comments
The man who wrote 10,000 Grooks (
grooks,
grooks,
grooks), Piet Hein, was also the inventor of
Hex and the creator of the
Soma Cube. In the design world, he is most famous for the
SuperEllipse, a figure that rivals Buckminster Fuller's geodesics in ingenuity, an aesthetic balance between a circle and a square, and a
mathematical figure which has been used to design a
square in Stockholm. From the SuperEllipse, you can get the SuperEgg, a strange solid which will unexpectedly balance on one end and has been
mistaken for an alien artifact.
posted by Winterfell
on Oct 28, 2002 -
11 comments
