Wolfgang von Kempelen's speaking machine

A replica of Kempelen's speaking machine, built 2007–09 at the Department of Phonetics, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

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]

  1. ^ Standage, Tom, The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine, New York: Walker & Company, 2002: pp 76–81
  2. ^ Dudley, Homer & Tarnoczy, T.H., The Speaking Machine of Wolfgang Von Kempelen. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol 22, No 2, March 1950: pp 151–166.
  3. ^ Linggard, R., Electronic Synthesis of Speech, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985: pp 4–9