The real story of this most ingenious and successful scientific fraud is so interesting that I must tell it here, although it puts for ever Baron von Kempelen's chess-player outside the circle of true automata. In the year 1776, a regiment, half Russian and half Polish, mutinied at Riga. The mutineers were defeated,' and their chief officer, Worouski, fell, having had both his thighs fractured by a cannon ball. He hid himself in a ditch until after dark, when he dragged himself to the neighbouring house of a doctor named Osloff, a man of great benevolence, who took him in and concealed him, but he had to amputate both his legs. During the time of Worouski's illness, Osloff was visited by his intimate friend the Baron von Kempelen, and after many consultations and much thought, Kempelen hit upon the idea of conveying him out of the country by devising this automaton (as Worouski was a great chess-player), and in three months the figure was finished.

In order to avoid suspicion he gave per

The first

formances en route to the frontier. performance was given at Toula, on the 6th of November, 1777 (that is to say exactly 114 years ago to-day). The machine and Worouski were packed in a case and started for Prussia, but when they reached Riga, orders came from the Empress Katherine II., for Baron von Kempelen to go to St. Petersburg with his automaton. The Empress played several games with him, but was always beaten, and then she wanted to buy the figure. This was an awkward situation for Kempelen, and he was at his wits' end to know how to wriggle out of it. He declared that his own presence was absolutely necessary for the working of the machine, and that it was quite impossible for him to sell it, and, after some further discussion, he was allowed to proceed on his journey.

This chess-player was, in the same year, purchased by Mons. Anthon, who took it all over Europe. At his death it came into the hands of Johann Maelzel, the inventor of the Metronome,

who sent it to the United States. It was afterwards sent back to Europe, and in the year 1844 was in the possession of a mechanician of Belleville, named Croizier.

Maelzel himself was a mechanician of very considerable skill, and he constructed an automaton trumpeter, which was exhibited at Vienna about the year 1804, which played the Austrian and French cavalry marches, and marches and allegros by Weigl, Dussek, and Pleyel. Maelzel was, after that, appointed mechanician to the Austrian Court, and constructed an automatic orchestra, in which trumpets, flutes, clarionets, violins, violoncellos, drums, cymbals, and a triangle, were introduced, and this attracted very great interest in the Austrian capital at the time.

In the year 1772 there was in Spring Gardens, near Charing Cross, a most remarkable collection of automata exhibited in a place of entertainment known as Cox's Museum, and here I have an original copy of the "Descriptive

catalogue, of the several superb and magnificent pieces of mechanism and jewellery exhibited in Mr. Cox's Museum, at Spring Gardens, Charing Cross." To which this footnote is added, "Hours of Admission, 11, 2, and 7, every day (Sundays excepted), tickets Half a Guinea each, admitting one person, to be had at Mr. Cox's, No. 103, Shoe Lane." This was a very extraordinary exhibition, and contained upwards of twenty large and elaborate automata, several of them being adorned with gold and precious stones. Some were complicated clocks, some were large groups of animals, and figures with fountains and cascades around them. None of these objects was less than nine feet high, and some were as high as sixteen feet. I can find nothing important enough from a Mechanick's point of view, to describe in detail, but it was the precursor in the same place of the exhibition of Monsieur Maillardet, which was one of the London attractions at the beginning of the present century.

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