Playing chess with an unseen opponent, though common enough online today, has a long history: games by correspondence date back to 1119, when Henry I of England played Louis VI of France. Chess by mail thrived with the advent of the in 1840, as expanding empires flung chess partners increasingly far apart. Yet these games had an intractable problem. They were, even for chess, agonisingly slow: one game between Brooklyn chess master Francis Brenzinger and his brother Karl, who lived in the German city of Pforzheim, dragged on from 1859 to 1875. So Victorian gamers sought a solution in their latest technology: the telegraph.
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ON THE morning of 8 April 1845, an all-star team of chess players assembled at Vauxhall railway station in London. Instead of dashing for a departing train, they sat down at a chess board next to a that inventor Charles Wheatstone had set aside for them. Discussing moves before a crowd of spectators were the chess writer George Walker, polymath Henry Thomas Buckle, inventor and avid player Walker Davies Evans, respected amateur William Tuckett and George Perigal, a veteran of chess by correspondence. At the other end of the line, 130 kilometres away in Gosport, on England’s south coast, were two formidable opponents: British chess master Howard Staunton and chess writer Hugh Alexander Kennedy. The boards were set, and at 11 am the game was on.
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As moves were wired in standard chess notation, Wheatstone’s fellow inventor William Fothergill Cooke explained the telegraph to spectators at Vauxhall. It was his plan, he said, to allow the public to use it for transmissions between London and Gosport – for a fee. One spectator immediately wanted a trial. He had a friend watching the game in Gosport, he said, and would the gentleman be back in London to dine that evening? Between moves, Cooke sent the query down the line. “Yes, at five,” came the reply after a short pause, and with that the crowd was sold.
The match proved less decisive. After seven-and-a-half hours, it ended in a draw and Staunton and Kennedy missed the last train back to London. All the same, the event itself was big news. One reporter pondered what else could be achieved now that human thought and action could be effected from far away by wire. “Instead of blowing up a ship at the moderate distance of six miles by one of [our] projectiles, we shall be enabled to do so at a distance of a thousand miles,” he ventured, before speculating on more peaceful uses: “A galvanic arrangement might be made by which our accomplished pianist, Madame Dulcken, might [perform]… wherever a few wires could be conveniently transmitted.”
By December 1848, telegraph offices at Paddington and Slough railway stations were advertising lines for hire for “chess and draughts played by telegraph” with any major city in Britain. As telegraph lines spread, so did intercity matches between chess clubs, first between Liverpool and Manchester in 1856, and then across America and Australia. A match between London and Dublin in 1865 notched up 646 moves in one evening on 12 boards, and one Hungarian match telegraphed a game from city to city like a chain letter.
Cable chess truly came into its own, however, in 1896, when players in New York and London competed for a trophy proffered by the British MP George Newnes. Newnes was a savvy entrepreneur, who as publisher of Tit-Bits magazine had made his name giving away “Tit-Bits villas” to readers and promising £500 to the family of any man who died with a copy of Tit-Bits in his pocket. The transatlantic match was another stroke of PR genius.
Seated around eight boards in the Dime Savings Bank in Brooklyn were some of America’s top players, including the young genius Harry Nelson Pillsbury. Some 1500 spectators watched play on eight giant duplicate boards that had been hung on the bank’s walls as countermoves were relayed from Cannon Street Hotel in London.
Despite a surprising loss by Pillsbury, the American team prevailed. Newnes promised his compatriots would compete again the following year, and cable chess had its first regular event: the Newnes cup. A university tournament soon followed, with the Ivy League pitted against Oxford and Cambridge. Aside from a few short breaks – in one case because the cable itself broke – these matches became one of the highlights of the chess enthusiast’s year for the next two decades.
After the first Newnes match, the British humorous magazine Punch published what it claimed was an interview with a London telegraph office’s new “sport by wire” manager: “We cable over to the Associated Press full particulars of our imaginary [soccer] kickoff… [they] wire back their return kick with name, age, weight and address of the kicker… There’s our Ladies’ Inter-Varsity Stay-at-Home Hockey Contest… That’s the river editor, hard at work in that armchair, rowing against Yale by cable… But I must ask you to excuse me now, as I have a billiard tournament, a yacht race and a cricket match with all Australia to manage simultaneously.”
Punch‘s satire wasn’t so wide of the mark. A number of North American cities began to stage telegraphed intercity bowling tournaments, with one in 1911 pitting New York, Montreal, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Seattle against each other simultaneously. The telegraph was rather less practical for other games. Telegraphed billiards matches used a gridded table that enabled players to cable the positions of the balls, but the system proved frustratingly slow – though not as slow as previous attempts at billiards by mail.
“Telegraphed billiards was frustratingly slow – but not as slow as billiards by mail”
The possibilities of cable chess, however, remained alluring. After the Newnes cup match, John Henniker Heaton, another British MP and tireless advocate of both chess and cheap cable rates, issued a friendly challenge. How about a chess match between the House of Commons and the US House of Representatives?
The match took place on 1 June 1897 and was a truly international event, with Austrian minister Baron von Hengerver online in Vienna to adjudicate any disputes. The only hint of politics came when Arthur Balfour, the Conservative leader of the House of Commons, popped into committee room number 12, where five games were in progress, and cabled his greetings to the Americans.
“Mr Shaforth, of Colorado (board 2), is an ardent bimetallist, and is [now] naturally inclined to even greater exertions,” came the reply from Washington, alluding to Balfour’s controversial support for both a gold and a silver monetary standard.
Unusually for politicians, the two teams spent little time deliberating: moves flew back and forth at speed, with one exchange between Horace Plunkett (Unionist, South Dublin) and Richard Pearson (Democrat, North Carolina) flashing by in 13¼ seconds. The American team was widely considered the weaker of the two, but when the frenzied tapping ceased eight hours later, the MPs were surprised to find they had been held to a draw. Heaton was so delighted by the match that in 1902 he proposed one with the new Australian parliament, while in the US a national cable chess league was mooted, although the notion never quite caught on.
What ultimately held back telegraphic chess was its staggering cost. The Newnes cup matches, even at a discount newspaper rate of 10¢ a word, quickly ran up a huge bill. The cabled chess notation of “1 Kt 1 to KB 3” was charged as six words, or 60¢. A typical game of 50 moves came to a bruising $30.
The first world war and changing technology finally put an end to telegraphic chess, which was quickly replaced by wireless and telephone matches. Occasionally these were dogged by the same complications that had hindered cable chess. While playing a London-Moscow radio match in 1946, chess columnist Harry Golombek later recalled, the lapse of an hour between moves made him hopeful that he had flustered his opponent. “This dream was punctured,” he wrote, “by a message from Moscow asking why I had not played for over an hour.” Even the latest gaming technology could be checkmated by human error: Golombek reported that his move was later found on a scrap of paper under a cup and saucer.
More: In later decades, chess players resorted to telex machines to overcome Cold War tensions; played against thousands of people via the internet; used live satellite feeds to play intercontinental matches; and even played against opponents in space.
