The Walker Chess-player was a chess-playing "machine" created by the Walker Brothers of Baltimore, Maryland. The machine was produced in the 1820s to compete with The Turk, a world-famous chess "machine". Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, a Bavarian musician with an interest in various machines and devices who owned and operated the Turk, viewed the competing machine and attempted to buy it, but the offer was declined and the duplicate machine toured for a number of years, never receiving the fame that Mälzel's machine did, and eventually fell into obscurity.
These 19th-century machines were hoaxes that disguised a human player with stage-magic devices; unlike modern chess playing machines which play without human intervention, such as Belle.
Famous quotes containing the words walker, chess-player:
“To me, the black black woman is our essential mother—the blacker she is the more us she is—and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.”
—Alice Walker (b. 1944)
“The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all these more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)