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E.A.Poe wrote, ''Yet the question of its modus operandi is still undetermined. It is quite certain that the operations of the Automaton are regulated by mind and by nothing else.'' And Poe wrote: ''Maelzel has a peculiar shuffle with his feet, calculated to induce the suspicion of collusion with the machine in minds which are more cunning than sagacious.'' Poe speculated ''that it would be only slightly more difficult to build a machine capable of winning all games
than a machine capable of winning some games.'' --Tom Standage 'The Turk' 2002.   Biographer Harvey Allen wrote, '' 'Maelzel's Chess-Player' was the first of Poe's works in which he emerged as the unerring, abstract reasoner, and foreshadowed the method he followed later in his detective stories such as 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' -- a method which has been embalmed in the triumphs of Sherlock Holmes.''
Dr. Silas Mitchell, who had attended as a child, recalled that ''the
Turk, with his oriental silence and rolling eyes, would haunt your nightly visions for many an evening thereafter.'' Maelzel died at sea out of
Havana, Cuba, ''as the ship approached Charleston'' [soon to be site of first battle of USA Civil War]. Professor John Kearsley Mitchell, E.A.Poe's sometimes benefactor, bought the Turk at auction. So, the Turk passed from Napoleon's stepson Eugene de Beauharnais' estate directly to Poe's family doctor. But mixed-up crates contained pieces of Maelzel's other automata and missing parts, Maelzel's final stratagem.   --Standage 'The Turk' 2002