ABSTRACT
In 1820, Robert Willis attended a demonstration of Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen’s “Turk” automaton, which had bedazzled audiences across Europe with its ability to play chess with considerable skill. Kempelen’s Turk was extremely alarming in its implication that human intelligence could be emulated through mechanical ingenuity, but, as it would eventually be discovered, the automaton was a hoax: beneath the chessboard, inside the Turk’s table, a human operated the machine and directed its movements. Apparently assuming the actual forms of the organs to be essential to their production, they have contented themselves with describing with minute precision the relative positions of the tongue, palate and teeth, peculiar to each vowel, or with giving accurate measurements of the corresponding separation of the lips, and of the tongue and uvula, considering vowels in fact more in the light of physiological functions of the human body than as a branch of acoustics.
