Wolfgang von Kempelen's speaking machine is a manually operated speech synthesizer that began development in 1769, by Austro-Hungarian author and inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen. It was in this same year that he completed his far more infamous contribution to history: The Turk, a chess-playing automaton, later revealed to be a very far-reaching and elaborate hoax due to the chess-playing human-being occupying its innards.[1] But while the Turk's construction was completed in six months, Kempelen's speaking machine occupied the next twenty years of his life.[2] After two conceptual "dead ends" over the first five years of research, Kempelen's third direction ultimately led him to the design he felt comfortable deeming "final": a functional representational model of the human vocal tract.[3]