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200 Korún Death of Wolfgang Kempelen
| Issuer | Národná banka Slovenska (National Bank of Slovakia) |
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| Year | 2004 |
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| Composition | Silver (.750) |
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| Obverse description | The obverse presents a complex allegorical composition celebrating the inventions of Wolfgang Kempelen. At center, a turbaned automaton chess player — Kempelen's famous 'Mechanical Turk' — is depicted seated at a chessboard, rendered in high relief. To the upper left, stylized flying figures allude to his speech-machine and phonetic studies, while the Slovak coat of arms appears to the right. In the lower field, additional mechanical devices and apparatus associated with Kempelen's inventions are depicted. The denomination '200 Sk' is inscribed to the left, with the legend 'SLOVENSKÁ REPUBLIKA' in the lower exergue and the year '2004' below. |
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| Obverse lettering | SLOVENSKÁ REPUBLIKA 200 Sk 2004 |
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Wolfgang von Kempelen is best remembered for the Turk, an apparent chess-playing automaton he built in 1770 for the Habsburg court of Maria Theresa. The machine defeated Benjamin Franklin, Catherine the Great, and Napoleon — all of whom failed to expose the mechanism. It was, of course, a hoax: a concealed human operator worked the arm from inside the cabinet. Kempelen himself downplayed it throughout his life, far more interested in his speaking machine, a bellows-driven apparatus that could approximate human vowels and remains one of the earliest serious attempts at mechanical speech synthesis.