Wolf of Kempelen

* Bratislava, January 23, 1734 – † Vienna, March 26, 1804 / court councilor, inventor, technical expert ; ; He began his school studies in his hometown. He studied humanities and law in Győr and Vienna. After the successful translation of Maria Theresa's code of laws into German, he joined the royal chamber, where he became secretary, and then in 1759 director of the Hungarian salt mines, and in this capacity he managed to establish order in the field of salt mining. In 1769 he built a pontoon bridge in Bratislava. In 1770 he became councilor and chief director. He was the director of the construction of the royal palace in Buda. He participated in the relocation of the Nagyszombat university to Buda. From 1786 he was a councilor at the united Hungarian and Transylvanian chancellery, retiring in 1798. He was an extremely versatile talent, especially famous for his inventions and mechanical creations. His water-lifting machine supplied the fountains of Schönbrunn. He perfected the steam engine and constructed the ancestor of the steam turbine, a speech-imitating machine (1778) and a typewriter for the blind. He supervised the construction of the Buda Castle Theatre. He is best known for his chess machine (1769), although it was an ingenious toy made only on the orders of Maria Theresa. ; Its description was published in the 1784 issue of the Leipziger Magazin für Naturkunde, Mathematik und Oekonomie. Its structure, as the machine is said to have burned down in Philadelphia in 1854, has not been clarified to this day. He was a great linguistic talent, writing, speaking and reading in eight languages. His study on the structure of human speech is the founder of modern phonetics. He established, for example, the difference between the formation of vowels and consonants, he recognized the difference between hard and soft consonants. To write this work, he acquired physical, physiological, linguistic and even thorough anatomical knowledge. He made his speaking machine – which, imitating the voice of a 3-4 year old child, pronounced words relatively intelligibly – to prove his theory. The machine was based on imitating the functioning of the speech organs. It had a bellows corresponding to the lungs, a whistle replacing the vocal cords, openings replacing the nasal cavity and a funnel imitating the oral cavity. The aim of these researches was also to promote the healing of deaf-mutes and speech defects. He also wrote plays, musical works and poems, which were successfully performed at the time. He owned the Gombán in Csallóköz. ; ; His main work: Mechanismus der menschlichen Sprache, 1791.