This is Angela Odell and you are listening to real cool history for kids.

A podcast show featuring history told from a distinctly biblical world view perspective.

Welcome to an adventure.

Welcome to episode 80 of real cool history for kids.

This episode is for Katie who wanted me to tell you all one of her favorite stories from history,

the mystery of the chess playing Turk. So to all of my friends listening, this one is for you.

Have you ever seen someone doing what they call magic tricks?

The performers who do these tricks have practiced long hours to be able to trick the viewers

into thinking they are actually witnessing magic happening before their eyes.

If they're really good at their craft, they can make it seem like they are doing the impossible.

But they're really not. What they are doing is called slight of hand.

This slight of hand is actually an optical illusion. It looks like something that it isn't

because the performer has drawn your attention away from what they are really doing just enough

to keep your brain from processing the hidden information. It's really quite amazing how good

some people are at these tricks. Well, the story I'm going to tell you today is about a slight of

hand trick that lasted for 84 years. As you know, to understand how people saw or understood

something in another time period, we need to put ourselves into their time period as much as possible.

This means we need to imagine what life was like at that time. So close your eyes and imagine with me.

There's no electricity, so there are no electric lights, no TVs or televisions or cell phones,

and no electronic technology like we have today. So back in the year 1770, there were no computers.

So there were no programmable robots. Any kind of automated device was operated by a winding mechanism,

not a computer chip or electricity or batteries like we used today.

...