Ajeeb

Ajeeb was a chess-playing "automaton", created by Charles Hooper (a cabinet maker),[1] first presented at the Royal Polytechnical Institute in 1868.

A piece of faux mechanical technology (while presented as entirely automated, it in fact concealed a strong human chess player inside), it drew scores of thousands of spectators to its games, the opponents for which included Harry Houdini, Theodore Roosevelt, and O. Henry.

Ajeeb's name was derived from the Arabic word عجيب (ʿajīb) meaning "wonderful, marvelous."

Moehle, for instance, gained further popularity playing chess in the United States,[3] where the contraption was also exhibited in the Eden Museum in 1885 and Coney Island in 1915.

[6] In the history of such devices, it succeeded the Mechanical Turk and preceded Mephisto.