Johann Nepomuk Maelzel invented weird and wonderful devices, but none were more successful than the metronome, writes Misha Donat
Following his victory over the Austrian army at the Battle of Wagram on 5-6 July 1809, Napoleon established his Viennese headquarters at the palace of Schönbrunn. Many entertainments were put on for his benefit over the next few months, and among those who displayed their talents before the French Emperor was an inventor called Johann Nepomuk Maelzel. The recent battle had been particularly costly in terms of the dead and wounded, and Napoleon was impressed by the artificial limbs designed by Maelzel. He asked the inventor to come up with a collapsible cart that could be used to transport the wounded from the battlefield – and Maelzel readily agreed. But knowing of Napoleon’s interests away from the fighting, he mentioned a machine he could already demonstrate to him.
This was no less than a chess-playing automaton named the ‘Turk’, after the life-size model of a turban-clad figure who sat at it. The invention wasn’t actually Maelzel’s own, though he was happy enough to take the credit for it: it had been built by an official in Empress Maria Theresa’s entourage named Wolfgang von Kempelen, who caused a sensation when he first displayed it in 1770. Following Kempelen’s death in 1804 Maelzel purchased the machine from his son, and made various refinements to it. The world’s first chess computer was eventually revealed to be an elaborate hoax containing a live player cunningly concealed within its depths – but not before Napoleon had played against it and attempted unsuccessfully to fool it by executing some illegal moves.
The inventions to which Maelzel could more legitimately lay claim were largely connected with the world of music, and one of them was linked to a more serious defeat for Napoleon. On 21 June 1813 the French troops were vanquished by the Duke of Wellington’s army at the Battle of Vitoria in Spain. The previous year Maelzel had built a machine he called a panharmonicon, a sort-of elaborate music box that could imitate the sounds of an entire orchestra. Now he planned to capitalise on his invention by commissioning Beethoven to compose a piece for it to mark Wellington’s victory, the news of which reached a jubilant Vienna only towards the end of July.
Beethoven duly produced his piece, and Maelzel transferred it onto the studded cylinders activated by weights that drove his machine. The cylinders’ capacity was, however, limited, and the panharmonico
