Ajeeb
Sign in to savethumb|right|Photo of "Ajeeb the Wonderful", 1886 right|thumb|An advertisement for an exhibition of Ajeeb, including an illustration of its appearance. Ajeeb was an imitation of Mechanical Turk|the Turk.
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thumb|right|Photo of "Ajeeb the Wonderful", 1886 right|thumb|An advertisement for an exhibition of Ajeeb, including an illustration of its appearance. Ajeeb was an imitation of Mechanical Turk|the Turk.
Ajeeb was a chess-playing "automaton", created by Charles Hooper (a cabinet maker), 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.