FABER’S TALKING AUTOMATON
A PRECURSOR TO THE TELEPHONE

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FABER, Joseph.

Padova, Teatro Garibaldi in Via Pedrocchi… Seconda ed ultima produzione del celebre e tanto applaudito professore Faber americano, possessore della macchina parlante. La più ingegnosa invenzione del giorno….

Padova, Tip. Crescini, 1877.

Broadside (45.9 x 21.2 cm). Printed letterpress in various type fonts and sizes on yellow paper, with “Macchina Parlante” in wooden type printed vertically and framing a woodcut of the talking machine (14 x 11 cm) at the center. The woodcut of the talking machine clearly depicts the curly periwigged female mask that covered the apparatus involved in sound production, with bellows behind it and levers and other mechanisms arranged nearby, all of which sit on a table-like platform with pedals at bottom. A few horizontal folds.

This provincial illustrated broadside, issued by the Teatro Garibaldi in Padova in 1877, announces a presentation of Professor Joseph Faber’s “talking machine” (“macchina parlante”), an ingenious human-like automaton that represented one of the earliest attempts to synthesize and reproduce human speech and that fascinated Alexander Melville Bell, a Scottish professor of speech. Talking machines like Faber’s also inspired Melville Bell’s son, Alexander Graham Bell, who as a young man built his own “talking head” (cf. Lindsay). Later in his life, he would go on to conduct his own experiments in speech reproduction, ultimately leading to the invention of the telephone.

In the decades before Faber’s talking machine, figures like Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein (1723-1795) created a primitive machine that could reproduce vowels, and in 1791 Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734-1804) invented an “acoustic-mechanical speech machine” that could generate consonants. Joseph Faber (c1786-1866), an Austrian inventor—not American as erroneously indicated on this broadside--reportedly dedicated some 30 years to developing his own talking machine that reproduced both vowels and consonants to more closely resemble true human speech. Faber demonstrated an early version of his machine in Vienna in 1840 and to the King of Bavaria in 1841, but it generated little interest. He then moved to the United States and debuted his “Wonderful Talking Machine” in New York City in early 1844, then in Philadelphia in 1845. The machine soon attracted the attention of P.T. Barnum, the American showman and promoter, who renamed the machine the “Euphonia” and took the invention to London, where it was unveiled at the Egyptian Hall.

According to the broadside, “this machine speaks like a person and with a tone of voice equal to that of a man, in the Italian, English, French, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Wallachian, Russian, Portuguese, Latin, Greek and Arabic languages. The spectators themselves can make it speak. It took Professor Faber 30 years to obtain such a brilliant result, making this machine the most interesting product that human ingenuity has created” (translated from the original Italian).

The Euphonia was a fascinating combination of the familiar and the fantastical. A piano keyboard comprising 17 keys controlled a mechanical replica of the human vocal tract, complete with bellows acting as lungs and an artificial larynx. By pressing the keys, the operator could manipulate the Euphonia's Indian rubber lips and mouth, tongue, and jaw, producing sounds that vaguely resembled human speech. It could reportedly produce all the sounds needed for European languages, though mastering even a single vowel sound proved a significant challenge, regularly making the Euphonia the object of mockery.

After London, P.T. Barnum showed the Euphonia at his American Museum of Curiosities in New York City, where Mathew Brady’s studio photographed it in 1860, and later in his touring circus. Faber’s talking machine was still being shown in Barnum’s Circus in Toronto in 1874, and it was still making the rounds in European theaters and side-shows during the same decade, as evidenced by this Italian broadside. One of the Euphonia’s few devotees was Alexander Melville Bell. His son, the inventor Alexander Graham Bell, would go on to conduct his own experiments in speech reproduction, ultimately leading to the invention of the telephone.

* Thomas L. Hankins & Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 214; David Lindsay, “Talking head,” in American Heritage’s Invention & Technology, vol 13 issue 1 (1997), https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/talking-head-1, accessed 8/28/2024; Allison Nugent, “Text-To-Speech in 1846 Involved a Talking Robotic Head With Ringlet”, in Atlas Obscura, 9 March 2016, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/texttospeech-in-1846-involved-a-talking-robotic-head-with-ringlets, accessed 7/17/2024.

Price: $1,250.00