Blast from the past: the world's first speaking machine!

We have taken technology for granted, I’m sure. During the 18th century, a speaking machine would have been just a weird dream—a figment of some eccentric scientist’s imagination. The subject in question, Wolfgang von Kempelen from Hungary, like all scientists, had decided nothing was impossible, so he created the first speaking machine the world has known. Today, we listen to iPods, the radio, and god knows how many different speaking machines. Kempelen built his machine to create not just speech sounds, but whole words and short sentences as well. His machine consisted of bellows that could be operated with your right forearm and a wind box that was actuated by levers. By working the bellows and the wind box, speech is produced. Apparently, the system was developed around the same time that Kratzenstein, a professor of psychology in Copenhagen, had produced vowels with the help of resonance tubes linked to organ pipes.

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Via: Presurfer