Henry Turton

Henry Turton (* 16 April 1832 in Shipston-on-Stour, Stratford-on-Avon district; † 14 April 1881 in Derby) was a British chess composer.

Life
Turton's parents were William Turton (1804-1860), a solicitor, and his wife Elizabeth (* 1803). He had two younger siblings, Roland Thomas (1834-1851) and Henrietta Mary (* 1837). The family first moved to Wolverhampton, later to Tunstall, now part of Stoke-on-Trent. In 1850 Turton began to compose and publish chess problems, and a series of chess games have also survived. In 1856, Johann Jacob Löwenthal appointed Turton to the committee organising the chess composition tournament of the magazine The Era. He was elected to the judging panel.His judgement on the first and second prizes can be read in the German translation of Löwenthal's tournament report; Turton initially voted in favour of Frank Healey's entry, but revised this assessment when an incorrectness was found in one of Healey's compositions.At this time Turton was living in Burton-upon-Trent, later moving to Bath. Between 1850 and 1860 he wrote almost all of his published chess problems.

He then devoted himself mainly to his profession as an engineer. He married Rolinda Osborne (1841-1880) in 1864. In November 1872, Turton published an essay in the journal The English Mechanic and World of Science on a technical improvement to Holtz's influence machine, which was also published in the New York yearbook The Science Record edited by Alfred Ely Beach. No further traces of his professional activity have survived. He also took part in a city chess match between Bath and Bristol in 1871 as part of the Bath team. His last place of residence was Derby, where he worked for Haslam Engineering, a company specialising in refrigeration technology.

He died of a heart attack after going to bed on 14 April 1881.

It is quite possible that Henry Turton was the first patient in the UK to have a tooth extracted under nitrous oxide anaesthesia. According to a letter from dentist William Lloyd Poundall to the British Journal of Dental Science in 1870, he was asked in 1856 or 1857 by an engineer, Henry Turton, who lived in Burton-upon-Trent, to perform a tooth extraction under nitrous oxide. Turton is said to have brought the gas himself, apparently produced by a friend ("Hallam") who was a pharmacist in the same town. The treatment is said to have been successful, as was another tooth extraction a little later. In an essay for the British Journal of Anaesthesia, the anaesthetist W. D. A. Smith researched the circumstances of this story and found them to be plausible.
 

Work
The Turton theme
Henry Turton was the first performer of a theme in chess composition to which Johannes Kohtz and Carl Kockelkorn gave his name in their work The Indian Problem. Kohtz and Kockelkorn spoke of "Turton's average point",[7] today the term Turton is commonly used. It is a doubling of long steps on a line, row or diagonal, which is initiated by a critical move. The original Turton is shown below. Here the weaker piece is pushed back over the intersection so that the stronger piece can stand in front. Variations of this idea are the Loyd Turk (the stronger piece is pushed back so that the weaker piece can stand in front), the Brunner Turk (the two pieces are equal, so usually two rooks) and the Zepler Turk (named after Erich Zepler; the doubling is achieved by pushing forward instead of pushing back over the critical point).

In Turton's problem, the white bishop critically crosses the intersection g7 so that the queen can place itself in front of it and the two white pieces are doubled in the correct order.

More chess problems and games by Turton
For a long time, there was no comprehensive collection of Turton's chess compositions. It was not until 2015 that Fabrizio Zavatarelli compiled and annotated 92 of Turton's compositions. 87 of them date from the years 1850 to 1860 and are mostly three- to five-move pieces. In addition, seven of Turton's games from the years 1853 to 1855 are documented there, five of them against Charles Ranken.
 

Source; de.wikipedia.org