In his April 1836 essay “Maelzel’s Chess-Player” in the Southern Literary Messenger, Edgar Allan Poe concluded that the famous chess-playing automaton was not a machine at all, writing that “some person is concealed in the box during the whole time of exhibiting the interior” and that “the operations of the Automaton are regulated by mind, and by nothing else.” A skilled human player worked the figure from inside the cabinet.