"Inventing a speaking machine and attempting to build it according to a deliberate plan could certainly qualify as one of the most daring of all human projects."
Johann Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen de Pázmánd initially made his name by scamming vast swathes of the European population. His chess-playing automaton, known as The Mechanical Turk, was first revealed in 1770 to Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, and purported to be an invention that could best even the greatest chess minds. It toured Europe and the Americas, and bested Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. The automaton, dressed in Ottoman garb, earned a reputation for playing chess and solving chess puzzles like nothing seen before.
Unfortunately, the automaton was not capable of doing this (the first machine to win a chess game was Deep Blue in 1996). Kempelen's Turk was simply an elaborate mechanism in which one could hide an extremely talented chess player, who operated the automaton from inside.
While the Turk may have been Kempelen's most famous invention, his other, lesser-known, invention around two decades later was not a hoax, and in fact is argued to be the world's first speech synthesiser. Writing first in German (1789) and then in French (1792), Kempelen documented his (sometimes presciently correct, sometimes incredibly incorrect) observations on the production of human speech, followed by his attempts to replicate that using the materials he could find. Expect Enlightenment polymathy, intricate hand-etchings by the author, and a retelling of the one time he tried to steal a set of bagpipes from an unsuspecting peasant.
The translation by Shushan Teager represents the first translation of the French edition of this book. Edited by myself, Rivka Hyland, and Dr Bert Vaux, it was published by Wipf and Stock in 2022, and is available for purchase at Blackwell's.
Abkhazia, officially the Republic of Abkhazia, is a partially-recognised region in Georgia. In the mid-19th Century, thousands of Abkhaz were exiled to Turkey after resisting the Circassian genocide at the hands of the Russians, which killed over a million people. Although Turkey is home to the largest Abkhaz diaspora in the world, numbering over 100,000, the Cwyzhy dialect of Abkhaz has unfortunately gone with the death of its final speaker. This book, begun some 25 years ago, marks the last possible effort to compile and document it. With 25 years of work come 25 years of versions, some predating full Unicode support in Microsoft Word, meaning that the compilation effort, and the subsequent decision-making around which transcriptions, vocabulary, etc. to keep, is difficult. However, this project is equally rewarding, given the long and painful history of the Abkhaz peoples, and the recent death of the Cwyzhy dialect.
A selections of articles and interviews that I have written, as well as coverage of things that I've done