- Wolfgang von Kempelen
Johann Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen de Pázmánd ( _hu. Kempelen Farkas; _sk. Ján Vlk Kempelen) (
23 January 1734 –26 March 1804 ) was a Hungarianauthor andinventor with Irish ancestors.Life
Kempelen was from Pressburg (Bratislava),
Kingdom of Hungary (nowdaysSlovakia ). He studied law and philosophy in his birthtown, and then inGyőr , inVienna and in laterRome , but the mathematics and thy physics also interested him. He startedto work as a clerk in Vienna. He was most famous for his construction ofThe Turk , achess -playingautomaton later revealed to be ahoax . He also created a manually operated speaking machine, [cite web | title=Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University| url=http://www.ling.su.se/staff/hartmut/kemplne.htm] [cite web | title=Haskins Laboratories Article| url=http://www.haskins.yale.edu/featured/heads/SIMULACRA/kempelen.html] which was a genuine pioneering step in experimentalphonetics .Kempelen died in
Vienna . The Wolfgang von Kempelen Prize for Computing Science History Prize was named in his honor.Bibliography
*Vajda Pál: "Nagy magyar feltalálók." Bp., 1958.; Pap János: Kempelen Farkas.
*"Magyar tudóslexikon". Főszerk. Nagy Ferenc. Bp., 1997.
*Homer Dudley and T.H. Tarnoczy. The Speaking Machine of Wolfgang von Kempelen. "Journal of the Acoustical Society of America", March 1950, Volume 22, Issue 2, pp. 151–166. [http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=JASMAN000022000002000151000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes]
*Robert Löhr, "The Chess Machine" (Penguin Press, 2007) is a novel about Kempelen and his chess-playing hoax. Translated from the German by Anthea Bell.Notes
References
External links
* [http://www-gewi.uni-graz.at/ling/cgi-bin/data/gls/artikel/62/06-imre.pdf Angéla Imre: On the personality of Wolfgang von Kempelen] , in: Grazer Linguistische Studien 63 (2004), pp. 61-64
* [http://www.ling.su.se/staff/hartmut/farkas.htm Wolfgang von Kempelen on the Web]
* [http://www.ling.su.se/staff/hartmut/kemplne.htm Wolfgang von Kempelen's speaking machine and its successors]
* [http://web.onetel.net.uk/~johnrampling/turk.html The Chess-playing Turk]
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