The Mechanical Turk: The True Story of the Chess-playing Machine That Fooled the World by Tom Standage
This title tells the true story of the Turk, the infamous 18th-century automation. The story links an unlikely cast of historical characters, from Napoleon, Beethoven and Poe to the pioneers of the computer age, and provides an accessible way of examining the complex relationship between magic, man, mind and machine, from the Enlightenment to the computer age.