Additional information
by Wolfgang Von Kempelen (Author), Bert Vaux (Editor), Rivka Hyland (Editor)
In the late eighteenth century Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen, inspired by the success of his Mechanical Turk, which purported to be an automaton capable of playing chess, set out to create a machine that could actually speak, simulating the organs of speech by means of a series of bellows, pipes, and valves. His narrative of his efforts, together with a typically Enlightenment-era exposition of properties of human languages, appeared in slightly different German and French versions in 1791. The present work represents the first English-language translation of the French edition, augmented with linguistic and bibliographical information lacking in the original.
Author Biography
Wolfgang von Kempelen (full name Johann Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen de Pázmánd, 1734-1804) was a Hungarian writer and polymath, best known for his creation of the (supposedly) chess-playing Mechanical Turk and the speaking machine.
Bert Vaux is Professor of Phonology and Morphology at Cambridge University and a fellow of King's College, Cambridge.
Rivka Brod Hyland is a Rhodes Scholar and a graduate of Harvard and Oxford Universities. She lives and works in Istanbul.
Amanda McHugh holds BA and MPhil degrees in Linguistics from King's College, Cambridge University, with specialisms in phonetics and French.
Shushan M. Teager, an alumna of Wellesley College and MIT, is a retired research associate at the Boston University School of Medicine where she worked with her late husband, Professor Herbert Teager, chief of the department of biomedical engineering, on mapping air flow in the vocal tract during phonation. She lives in Belmont, MA.
