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Fiery Studios
Clockwork Game: The Illustrious Career of a ChessPlaying Automaton
Clockwork Game: The Illustrious Career of a ChessPlaying Automaton
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- In 1769, the court of Empress Maria Theresia witnessed one of that era's most amazing feats of engineering: a machine that could play chess. Artfully constructed by a Hungarian nobleman named Wolfgang von Kempelen, the chess-machine played a unique game against each opponent, far surpassing the abilities of all its fellow automata. Throughout its eighty-five year career,
audiences across Europe and the Americas flocked to see the mechanical marvel seemingly capable of human intelligence; Napoleon, Charles Babbage, and Benjamin
Franklin were among its challengers, and Edgar Allen Poe wrote an essay attempting to explain how it worked. Despite its demise over a hundred fifty years ago, its mystery continues to fascinate, and its audience's reaction to its Orientalist trappings casts fresh light on our present sense of the
'exotic'. - Written and Illustrated by Jane Irwin, author of the Vögelein
graphic novels, Clockwork Game retells the true story of the world's first chess-playing automaton, blending reality and fiction into a singular graphic novel.
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