Johann Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen invented a pioneering mechanical speech machine and the chess-playing “automaton,” famously known as the Turk....
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How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downwards! The antipathies, I think
Alice In Wonderland
The Austro-Hungarian versatile nobleman, scholar, architect, and inventor, Wolfgang von Kempelen, was mainly known for his fraudulent chess-playing Turk automaton, created in The Turk was considered the most famous illusion in history (it was exhibited with great success in Europe and USA until late when it was consumed in a fire in Philadelphia), and actually, Kempelen never said that his illusion really played chess by itself.
He said that it was a very ordinary piece of mechanism—a bagatelle whose effects appeared so marvelous only from the boldness of the conception, and the fortunate choice of the methods adopted for promoting the illusion. We are not going to examine the Turk however, but Kempelens Mechanism of Human Speech, which appears to be the first successful speech synthesizer.
Kempelens machine was described in