championship in 1894 and was both a chess and checker master. Paul, Minnesota, Albert Beauregard Hodges (1861-1944), Constant Ferdinand Burille (1866-1914), Charles Francis Barker (US checkers champion in 1905 and chess master), Harry Nelson Pillsbury (1872-1906), Doc Schaefer, Peter J. The operator was paid $75 a month.Īmong the masters that operated Ajeeb included Charles F. Hooper made another Ajeeb which performed concurrently in other cities (Minneapolis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and Kansas City). (source: The International Chess Magazine, Sep 1885) Hendricks played a game against Ajeeb and lost in a smothered mate. In September, 1885, President Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) and Vice-President Thomas Hendricks (1819-1885) visited Ajeeb’s chess room. If a player tried to cheat by moving to the wrong squares or taking off one of Ajeeb’s pieces, Ajeeb would knock all the pieces off the board. Hooper pretended to wind Ajeeb up by turning a large key fitted in a shaft on Ajeeb’s right side. He later hired chess and checker masters to be hidden inside Ajeeb. Hooper started out as the man inside Ajeeb and played chess and checkers until 1889. After deducting the salaries of a barker and the operator, and the $100 a week paid to Holloman, the Hoopers cleared over $1,000 a month. Ajeeb’s hours were from 1 pm to 5 pm every afternoon and from 7 pm to 10:30 pm every evening. The cost to play Ajeeb was ten cents for a checker game and 25 cents for a chess game (admission to the Eden Musee was 50 cents for adults and 25 cents for children). The Hoopers paid the owner (Richard Holloman) of the Musee $100 a week to exhibit Ajeeb. Ajeeb and Hooper came to New York and Ajeeb was displayed on the second floor in the Eden Musee (opened in March,1884 and closed in 1915) on Twenty-third Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, in New York. Hooper, writing that they had an interest in displaying Ajeeb. In 1885, the Eden Musee authorities cabled Mr. (source: Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb 21, 1878)

In 1878, another Ajeeb was on display in Chicago, invented by Charles Schultz. Samuel Rosenthal (1837-1902), Polish master, played it twice, winning one and losing one. Johannes Zukertort (1842-1888) is said to have played it and won. Over 100,000 people saw it perform in Berlin in a three-month period. Hooper and his wife then took Ajeeb to Berlin, Breslau, Dresden, Leipzig, Hanover, Magdeburg, Cologne, Elbefeld, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, Brussels, and Paris. In 1877 Ajeeb moved to the Royal Aquarium at Westminster. Between 18, it was on show at the London Crystal Palace. It was first displayed at the London Polytechnical Institute in 1868. In 1865, Charles Alfred Hooper (1825-1900), a Bristol cabinet-maker, began to build Ajeeb as a copy to the Turk, which had been destroyed in a fire in Philadelphia in 1854. Ajeeb means unique and beautiful in Arabic. It sat on a cushion mounted on a large box. It was a lifesize Indian figure with mobile head, trunk, and right arm. Ajeeb (sometimes called “The Egyption”) was the name of the second chess-playing automaton to become famous, after the Turk.

Ajeeb chess automaton