William Schlumberger

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

William Schlumberger (1800 in Mulhouse – April 1838 in Havana) was a European chess master. He is known to have taught Pierre Charles Fournier de Saint-Amant to play chess and as the operator of The Turk, a chess-playing machine which purported to be an automaton. It was Bavarian musician and showman Johann Nepomuk Mälzel who hired him to operate The Turk. Schlumberger acted as the Turk's director in Europe and in the United States until his death from yellow fever in 1838.

[edit] References

• Tom Standage, The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine. Walker and Company, New York City, 2002. ISBN 0802713912
• Gerald M. Levitt, The Turk, Chess Automaton. McFarland and Company Inc. Publishers, Jefferson, North Carolina, 2000.
• William Schlumberger at chess.com
• The man in the automaton at time.com
• Gaige, Jeremy (1987), Chess Personalia, A Biobibliography, McFarland, p. 377, ISBN 0-7864-2353-6