Ferdinand Maack

Ferdinand Maack, who lived from 1861 to 1930, was a German doctor, inventor and occultist. He is remembered as the inventor of Raumschach, the classic three-dimensional chess game, which he first described in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1907. He promoted the game through demonstrations, articles, specialist magazines and several books, and in 1919 he founded the Hamburg Raumschach Club, which stayed active until World War II. The source lead says nothing about his medical practice or specialty, so this entry records him as a physician known chiefly through his game invention and his interest in the occult.