In 1781, Kempelen was ordered by Emperor Joseph II to rebuild the Turk and take it to Vienna for a state visit from Grand Duke Paul of Russia. This was so successful that Grand Duke Paul suggested a tour of Europe for the Turk. Kempelen reluctantly agreed.
The tour began in 1783, beginning in France. In Paris,  the Turk lost a match to Charles Godefroy de La Tour d'Auvergne, the Duc de Bouillon. People wanted the Turk to play a game with François-André Danican Philidor, the best chess player of his time. Philidor won, but it was "his most fatiguing game of chess ever!" The Turk's final game in Paris was against Benjamin Franklin, the United State's ambassador to France. Franklin enjoyed the game with the Turk and kept a copy of Philip Thicknesse's book "The Speaking Figure and the Automaton Chess Player, Exposed and Detected" in his personal library.
After Paris, Kempelen moved the Turk to London, where it was on show every day at a cost of five shillings. Thicknesse, a skeptic, tried to explain that the machine was just a trick. He said Kempelen was "a very ingenious man", but the Turk was an elaborate hoax. He thought there was a small child inside the machine. The Turk was "a complicated piece of clockwork ... which is nothing more, than one, of many other ingenious devices, to misguide and delude the observers".
After a year in London, Kempelen and the Turk went to Leipzig, Dresden, and Amsterdam. After that the machine was probably stored at the Schönbrunn Palace for 20 years. Kempelen did try to sell it before his death. He died at the age of 70 on 26 March 1804.
In 1805 Kempelen's son sold the machine to Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, a Bavarian musician interested in machines and devices. Mälzel had designed a type of metronome. He had tried to purchase the Turk before Kempelen's death but the price was too high. Mälzel had to learn how the machine worked and make some repairs. He wanted to make the Turk a greater challenge.
In 1809, Napoleon I of France arrived at Schönbrunn Palace to play the Turk. Before the game, the Turk, with Johann Baptist Allgaier hidden inside, saluted Napoleon. In a surprise move, Napoleon took the first turn instead of allowing the Turk to make the first move. When Napoleon attempted an illegal move, the Turk put the piece back in its original spot and continued the game. After a second illegal move the Turk took the piece from the board. When Napoleon tried a third illegal move the Turk swept its arm across, knocking all the pieces off the board. Napoleon was amused, and then played a real game with the machine. After 19 moves Napoleon pushed over his king to show that he knew he could not win, and was giving up.
In 1811, Mälzel took the Turk to Milan to show Eugène de Beauharnais, the Prince of Venice and Viceroy of Italy. Beauharnais liked it so much, that he bought the Turk for 30,000 francs – three times what Mälzel had paid – and kept it for four years. In 1815, Mälzel went to Beauharnais in Munich and bought the Turk back.
Mälzel took the Turk back to Paris where he made friends of many of the leading chess players at Café de la Régence. In 1818 he moved to London and held a number of performances with the Turk and many of his other machines. He added a voice box so the machine could say "Échec!" when placing a player in check.
In 1826, Mälzel took the machine to New York City. Mälzel had problems finding people to operate the machine.  He ended up bringing William Schlumberger, from Alsace in Europe to come to America and work for him once again. Mälzel had to provide the money for Schlumberger's transport.
In Boston, Mälzel told a story that the New York chess players could not handle full games and that the Boston players were much better. This was a success for many weeks, and the tour moved to Philadelphia for three months. In Baltimore, it lost a match against Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Two American brothers built their own machine, the Walker Chess-player. Mälzel tried to buy it, but they would not sell it. This second machine toured for a number of years, but was never as famous as the Turk.
Between 1828, Mälzel visited Europe, returning to the States in 1829. In the 1830s, went as far west as the Mississippi River and visiting Canada. In Richmond, Virginia, Edgar Allan Poe, wrote about the Turk for the "Southern Literary Messenger". Poe's essay "Maelzel's Chess Player" was published in April 1836 and is the most famous essay on the Turk.
Mälzel took the Turk on his second tour to Havana, Cuba. In Cuba, Schlumberger died of yellow fever, leaving Mälzel without an operator. Mälzel died at sea in 1838 at the age of 66 during his return trip, leaving his machine with the ship captain.
The Turk was given to a friend of Mälzel's, the businessman John Ohl. He tried to sell it at auction but ended up buying it himself for $400. John Kearsley Mitchell, Edgar Allan Poe's doctor, bought the Turk from Ohl. Mitchell formed a club to fix it, completing the rebuilding in 1840.
Mitchell and his club gave the machine to the Chinese Museum of Charles Willson Peale. After a few shows it was put into a corner and forgotten. On 5 July 1854, a fire that started at the National Theater in Philadelphia reached the Museum and destroyed the Turk. Mitchell believed he had heard "through the struggling flames ... the last words of our departed friend, the sternly whispered, oft repeated syllables, 'echec! echec!!'
John Gaughan, an American in Los Angeles who made items for magicians, spent $120,000 building a copy of Kempelen's machine over a five-year period from 1984. The new machine used the Turk's chessboard, which was saved from the fire. Gaughan's Turk was displayed in November 1989 at a history of magic conference. This time, the Turk played against a computer running a chess program.
Most books and articles written during the Turk's life about how it worked were incorrect.
It was not until Dr. Silas Mitchell's series of articles for "The Chess Monthly" that the secret was fully revealed. Mitchell, son of the final owner of the Turk, wrote that "no secret was ever kept as the Turk's has been. Guessed at, in part, many times, no one of the several explanations ... ever solved this amusing puzzle". As the Turk had been destroyed, Silas Mitchell felt that there were "no longer any reasons for concealing from the amateurs of chess, the solution to this ancient enigma".
New interest began in the Turk when IBM created Deep Blue. This was a computer that could challenge the world's best players. The Turk was used as a personification of Deep Blue in the 2003 documentary "Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine".
The Turk inspired a number of inventions and copies. These included the Ajeeb, or "The Egyptian", built by Charles Hopper that President Grover Cleveland played in 1885; and Mephisto, the self-described "most famous" machine, of which little is known. The Walkers made the "American Chess Player" first shown in May 1827 in New York. El Ajedrecista was built in 1912 by Leonardo Torres y Quevedo and first shown at the Paris World Fair of 1914. It was the first true chess-playing automaton, and a precursor of sorts to Deep Blue.
Other people were inspired by the Turk. The Rev. Edmund Cartwright saw it in London in 1784. He later wrote "it is more difficult to construct a machine that shall weave than one which shall make all the variety of moves required in that complicated game". Cartwright would later invent the power loom. Sir Charles Wheatstone, an inventor, saw the Turk while it was owned by Mälzel. Mälzel later showed his speaking machines to the researcher and his teenage son. Alexander Graham Bell read a copy of a book by Wolfgang von Kempelen on speaking machines after seeing a similar machine built by Wheatstone. Bell went on to invent the telephone.