Mitchell's father, John Mitchell, was the final owner of the Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing "automaton" built in 1770 that secretly contained a human chess player. After the Turk burned in a fire in 1854, Silas Weir Mitchell no longer saw any point in keeping the Turk's secret, and published an article in 1857 detailing the workings of the Turk and its human player.