Not exactly a household name, but as [IEEE Spectrum] points out, he invented a chess automaton in 1920 that would foreshadow the next century’s obsession with computers playing chess.

In the early 1900s, a Spanish engineer, Leonardo Torres y Quevedo, created a chess-playing automaton called El Ajedrecista, which used electromagnets to play a simplified endgame of king and rook ...

The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a ...