Von Kempelen was born in Pressburg, part of the Kingdom of Hungary within the Habsburg Empire. He studied law and philosophy in Pressburg and attended the Academy in Gyor, Vienna and Rome, but it was mathematics and physics also interested him. He spoke Hungarian, German, Latin, French, Italian some English and Romanian.
He held a number of government positions and constructed steam-engines, water pumps, a pontoon bridge, patented a steam turbine for mills and a typewriter for the blind Viennese pianist Maria Theresia von Paradis. He built a theater house in Buda (now Budapest) and the famous fountains at Schoenbrunn in Vienna. He was also a talented artist and etcher, wrote poems and epigrams and composed a German light opera, Andromeda and Perseus, performed in Vienna.
He married twice, first in 1757 and after his wife died suddenly in 1758 of an abdominal obstruction he married again in 1762. His second wife bore five children, two survived into adulthood.
Though he had a long and successful career as a civil servant, von Kempelen was most famous for his construction of The Turk, a chess-playing automaton presented to Maria Theresa of Austria in 1769.
von Kempelen also created a manually operated speaking machine. Although his machine received considerable publicity, it was not taken as seriously because of his deception involving The Turk.
His speaking machine was a legitimate device that used a bellows to supply air to a reed which excited a resonator which could be manipulated to produce voice-like sounds.
An improved version was built from von Kempelen's description by Sir Charles Wheatstone who is credited in Britain with the invention of the telegraph.
von Kempelen's manually operated speech synthesizer began development in 1769, the same year that he completed The Turk, but while The Turk only took him six months to complete, the speaking machine occupied the next twenty years of his life.
His first experiment with speech synthesis involved only rudimentary elements of the vocal tract necessary to produce speech-like sounds. A kitchen bellows, used to stoke fires in wood-burning stoves, was used as a set of lungs to supply the airflow and a reed from a bagpipe was used for the glottis (part of the larynx consisting of the vocal cords and the opening between them). The bell of a clarinet was used for the mouth. His model was able to produce simple vowel sounds only, though some additional articulation was possible by positioning one's hand at the bell opening to obstruct airflow.
Sounds made by consonants are classed as nasals, plosives and fricatives and his machine couldn’t make those sounds. The hardware for constructing the nasals, plosives and fricatives that most consonants require resulted in his abandoning the single-reed design for a multiple-reed approach in his second design.
The second design involved a console, similar to that of a musical organ of the period, in which the operator manned a set of keys, one for each letter. The bellows that fed air through various pipes with the appropriate shapes and obstructions needed to produce that letter. Although not all letters were represented, von Kempelen was able to produce most vowels and several consonants and was able to begin forming syllables and short words. There was a flaw in that the sounds were very uncharacteristic of human speech. That lead to a third approach.
It consisted of a bellows, a reed and a simulated mouth (this time made of India rubber, for better creation of vowel sounds via manipulation by hand) and included a throat to which a nasal cavity was attached complete with two nostrils. These improvements helped with making n, m, s and sh sounds. At one point there was an alternate mouth assembly consisting of a wooden box with a pair of hinged shutters that acted as lips.
Inside the box was a hinged, wooden, string operated flap that acted as a tongue. This was supposed to make b and d sounds, but he later removed them because without a proper tongue, the machine would never be able to produce sounds for t, k, d and g.
He later discovered that even with the mispronunciations he believed that people were more forgiving of the errors due to the frequency of the reed and vocal tract resonant length.
This third design, unlike those before it, was capable of speaking complete phrases in French, Italian and English. It could also speak in German, but required a greater skill level by the operator due to the more frequent use of consonants in the German language.
The biggest limitation was the bellows. Even though they were six times the capacity of human lungs they ran out of air much faster than human lungs.
This machine spoke in monotone, a problem he was never able to resolve. Shortly after the completion and exhibition of his Speaking Machine, in 1804, von Kempelen died, though not before publishing an extremely comprehensive journal of the past twenty years of his research in phonetics.
In 1837, Sir Charles Wheatstone created an improved replica of von Kempelen’s Speaking Machine and was able to further analyze and synthesize components of acoustic speech, giving rise to the second wave of scientific interest in phonetics. After viewing Wheatstone's version Alexander Graham Bell set out to construct his own speaking machine and his experiments and research ultimately led to the invention of the telephone in 1876.
At the time of his death in 1804, von Kempelenowned a country estate in Gomba near Pozsony, but died in his apartment in Alser, a suburb of Vienna.
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