Le Grand Sultan

Le Grand Sultan stood on a table in a Paris salon: a figure in a turban, fifteen to eighteen inches tall, a small hammer in one hand and a bell in front of him. A spectator drew a card at hazard and kept it hidden. The showman had not seen it, and he did not walk over to the figure. He told the automaton to strike the bell as many times as the card was worth, and it struck the bell exactly that many times. Then he read out the suits, one at a time, and the figure turned its head at the right one and shook it at the others.

The fullest description of that machine to survive was written by the man who took it apart. Henri Decremps printed La Magie blanche dévoilée in Paris in 1784, and the first chapter of the book carries the title “Le Grand Sultan, Automate qui répond à diverses questions.” He opens by conceding that the piece had been known in Paris for a long time under another name: the Petit Turc savant.

Appearance

Decremps gives the height to the inch and a half: fifteen to eighteen pouces, which comes to roughly 40 to 48 centimetres, about the size of a large doll. It held a small hammer and struck a timbre, a bell. In 1906 Henry Ridgely Evans described the same machine as “the wonderful automaton known as ‘The Grand Sultan,’ also called ‘The clever little Turk,’” and gave its height as about forty centimetres. Two descriptions a century and a half apart agree on the size.

The figure stood on a table covered with a green cloth. No contemporary picture of it survives. Whether the head turned on a pivot, and what the body was made of, Decremps never says. The likeliest reading of the costume is Ottoman, since the Paris name calls the figure a savant, a learned man, and the wires are the only parts of the machine he describes in mechanical detail.

The cloth mattered more than the figure did. Under it lay the three levers that moved the automaton, and the wires that moved the levers. Everything the audience admired about the machine’s independence was arranged in the space between the tabletop and the floor.

What the figure did

Decremps sets out the routine in order.

The showman lifted the automaton off the table first and carried it round the room so the company could turn it over in their hands. The point of the walk was to establish that the figure was parfaitement isolé, with nothing attached to it. Back on the table, it was asked whether it wished to pay a compliment to its master, and turned its head to say no. Asked whether it wished to compliment the company, it lowered its head yes.

Then came the questions. A spectator drew a card at hazard. The figure struck the bell the number of times that expressed the card’s value. It nodded and shook its head through the suits until the right one was named. It gave the throw of dice that had not been tampered with, and then announced in advance the throw of a second cast. When someone hid a small doll in a box divided into compartments, the figure named the cell and the number where it lay. The act closed as a comedy. The automaton was asked who in the company was the most amorous, and it pointed out an old man in spectacles.

That last joke is the routine admitting what it is. The machine has just been consulted about hidden cards and unseen dice, and its final answer is a guess about the room that any of them could have made. The company laughed, and the laugh covered the seam. An oracle works when the questioner cannot check the answer by looking, and every effect in the act was built to keep the card face down and the doll inside the closed box.

Decremps takes it apart

The explanation starts at the table. The green cloth hides three bascules, levers, and each lever can be thrown by an iron wire. The three wires pass down inside the legs of the table and end under the stage floor or behind a partition. A hidden person sits there through the whole performance, and pulls a wire when he is told to. The wire moves a piece concealed in the pedestal of the automaton, and those pieces end at its base. Decremps compares the result to pressing the button of a repeating watch.

The bell therefore rang on a wire, and a man out of sight did the ringing. That man worked from a signal, and the signal is the part Decremps describes most carefully, because it had to be given in front of an audience listening to every word.

The showman put his question to the automaton in words chosen to carry the answer. Decremps says that the sentence spoken to the figure, its first syllables, or its final vowels, told the accomplice the colour and the value of the card. The room heard a man asking a machine a polite question. The man behind the partition heard a code.

The cards were arranged so that nothing had to be guessed. The operator held his pack in an order he knew by heart, and he only appeared to shuffle it. What he actually did was cut it, which leaves a memorised order intact. After the draw he cut the pack once more, at the place where the chosen card lay, and that cut slid the card sitting immediately above the chosen one to the bottom of the deck. Then he looked at the bottom of the pack as he set it down, and knew the drawn card without ever seeing its face.

The dice took a shorter route. To announce the second throw before it happened, the dice used for the first throw were quietly swapped for others carrying the same number of pips on every face. Where that substitution was too risky, weighted dice did the same work, loaded so that the centre of gravity forced one face upward. Either way the dice came out of the company’s hands quickly, because a second throw landing on the same number would have exposed them.

The box holding the doll needed neither wire nor code. Its bottom was soft leather, so a hand passed underneath could find the occupied compartment by touch, and the doll was made large enough to press a slight bulge into the leather once the lid was closed.

Decremps ends the chapter there. He never names the performer whose act he has just dismantled, and he does not pretend the explanation will delight anyone. In the preface, the Avis, he writes that the book is meant for people who watched a very skilful man perform the first twenty-three tricks in it, and adds that to other readers the explanations “pourra même leur paraître ennuyeuse & insipide,” may even seem boring and insipid. He printed them anyway, and the only surviving anatomy of the machine is his.

Cross-Cultural Connections

Le Grand Sultan belongs on the bestiary shelf that already holds the made being: the Golem shaped from clay and animated by a written name, the Homunculus grown in a flask, the Sennentuntschi carved by Alpine herdsmen, the Kratt built from household odds and ends to fetch treasure. Each of them is a thing a person made that then acts on its own. Le Grand Sultan is the version of that idea which needs no belief to function, because a hidden accomplice was pulling the wires under the table.

The nearer relative is the chess automaton. Decremps announced his reflections “sur la baguette divinatoire, les automates joueurs d’échecs” on the title page, so he sold the same book as an exposure of the dowsers and of the chess Turk. Kempelen’s automaton was touring Paris in 1783 and London in 1784 with a concealed player inside the cabinet, and Philip Thicknesse published The Speaking Figure, and the Automaton Chess-Player, Exposed and Detected in London in 1784. Petit Turc and Grand Turk were the same fraud at two different sizes: one hid a man under the table, the other hid him inside the box.

Paris in those years supplies the setting. Decremps’s book appeared in the same city and the same year as the royal commission that tested Mesmer’s magnetic fluid, and both belong to the moment when Paris began putting stage wonder on trial. The Occult Paris article follows that century of exposures. The voice made the same journey in the same decade. Ventriloquism had been a demonic possession until Jean-Baptiste de La Chapelle measured it in 1772 and located the sound in the throat. The automaton moved from an object with a spirit in it to an object with a wire in it.

The costume is a date stamp. A turbaned oracle in a Paris drawing room around 1780 sat inside the fashion the French called turquerie, when the robe à la turque and the lévite dress borrowed their collars and sashes from Ottoman clothing, as Kendra Van Cleave documents for the years 1670 to 1800. The automaton’s dress was a costume the audience already knew how to read.

Modern Survival

The chapter survives as a conjuring text rather than as folklore. The Conjuring Archive indexes the first chapter of La Magie blanche dévoilée under Coding, Using an Assistant, Automaton and Stacked Deck, which is a fair summary of the whole trick: a coded signal and a pack of cards in a known order. Both are still in the repertoire, and the second one long outlived the first.

The machine itself is coming back. Cristiana Daneo of Turin has built a working replica of Pinetti’s Petit Turc savant, which the Genii forum thread announcing it also calls the Grand Sultan.

What stays open is the ownership. Decremps never names the showman, and no workshop record, invoice or inventory of the machine has turned up. His readers assumed the book was about the Chevalier Joseph Pinetti, the Italian showman then working a Paris theatre, and Evans in 1906 states flatly that the Grand Sultan was Pinetti’s. Decremps’s own preface puts the act earlier than that, in the hands of a man he prefers not to identify. The automaton has an anatomy and no birth certificate.

The last thing it is recorded as doing in public was telling a Paris drawing room which of them was the most amorous. It pointed at the old man in spectacles.

Sources

• Decremps, Henri. La Magie blanche dévoilée, ou Explication des tours surprennants, qui font depuis peu l’admiration de la capitale & de la province, avec des réflexions sur la baguette divinatoire, les automates joueurs d’échecs, &c. &c. Paris, 1784. Chapter I, “Le Grand Sultan”, pp. 1-6; preface, “Avis”, p. xxvj. First-edition copy digitised by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10927241-4
• Decremps, Henri. La Magie blanche dévoilée. Paris, 1784. Second copy, with the chapter table (“Chapitre I. Le Grand Sultan, Automate qui répond à diverses questions, pag. 1”) and the engraved frontispiece, digitised at marianotomatis.it (biblioteca/repository/DEC1784.pdf)
• Hémery, Antoine François (engraver) after Queverdo (draughtsman). Frontispiece, “Professeur et Demonstrateur de Physique amusante,” in Decremps, La Magie blanche dévoilée. Paris, 1784
• Decremps, Henri. The Conjurer Unmasked; or, La Magie blanche dévoilée. London, 1785; further edition printed for C. Stalker, London, 1790. Internet Archive
• Pinetti, Giuseppe. Amusemens physiques. Paris, 1784
• Thicknesse, Philip. The Speaking Figure, and the Automaton Chess-Player, Exposed and Detected. London, 1784. Internet Archive, Eighteenth Century Collections
• Evans, Henry Ridgely. “Chevalier Pinetti, Conjurer.” The Open Court (1906). Reproduced by OpenSIUC, Southern Illinois University
• Michaud (ed.). Biographie Universelle Ancienne et Moderne, vol. 10, p. 262. Paris, 1852 (the source for Decremps’s birth and death dates)
• Van Cleave, Kendra. Dressing à la Turque: Ottoman Influence on French Fashion, 1670-1800. Kent State University Press, 2023
• The Conjuring Archive, catalogue entry for La Magie blanche dévoilée (Henri Decremps, 1784), entry 1245