Chess
Franklin was an avid chess player. He was playing chess by around 1733, making him the first chess player known by name in the American colonies. His essay on the "Morals of Chess" in Columbian magazine, in December 1786 is the second known writing on chess in America. This essay in praise of chess and prescribing a code of behavior for it has been widely reprinted and translated. He and a friend also used chess as a means of learning the Italian language, which both were studying; the winner of each game between them had the right to assign a task, such as parts of the Italian grammar to be learned by heart, to be performed by the loser before their next meeting. Franklin was inducted into the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame in 1999.
Read more about this topic: Benjamin Franklin
Famous quotes containing the word chess:
“The trick, which requires the combined skills of a tightrope walker and a cordon bleu chef frying a plain egg, is to take your [preteen] daughter seriously without taking everything she says and does every minute seriously.”
—Stella Chess (20th century)
“Of all my Russian books, The Defense contains and diffuses the greatest “warmth”Mwhich may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract chess is supposed to be.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head—no intricate game of chess where few moves are made in straight-forwardness and ends are attained by indirection, an oblique, tedious, barren game hardly worth that poor candle burnt out in playing it.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)