Maelzel's Chess Player

In his essay, Poe asserts that a mechanical chess player would play perfectly, but Maelzel's "machine" occasionally errs, and is therefore suspect.

He also may or may not have been aware of earlier articles written in the Baltimore Gazette where two youths were reported to have seen chess player William Schlumberger climbing out of the machine.

[4] Poe's essay asserts that Maelzel's troupe of automata had made at least one previous visit to Richmond, Virginia, "some years ago", at which time they were exhibited "in the house now occupied by M. Bossieux as a dancing academy".

Yet, very oddly, Poe gives no precise date or location for his own more recent encounter with Maelzel's Chess-Player, apart from stating that it was exhibited in Richmond "a few weeks ago".

[5] Poe also was beginning to create an analytic method that would eventually be used in his "tales of ratiocination",[6] the earliest form of a detective story, "The Gold-Bug" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue".