The Cold War is long over, and along with it the greatest flourishing of mad-scientific thought since the Dark Ages. But there are still some, like Estonian-born technocrat Anton Vaino, who keep the flame alive. By day, Vaino is Vladimir Putin’s new chief of staff, in charge of the daily schedule of one of the world’s most powerful men. By night, Vaino is the co-inventor of the nooscope, “the first device of its kind that allows for the study of humanity’s collective mind”—a tool so powerful it can, by Vaino’s own admission, see into the future.¹

Financial markets, like Selena and Bieber’s tumultuous, on-again, off-again romance, appear complicated, even chaotic to the casual observer. But beneath that apparent chaos lies a complex interplay of psychological, economic, and political forces. Gather enough data and feed it into a powerful enough predictive model and you can forecast how these forces will play out—at least that’s what advocates of big data and predictive analytics have been telling us for years.

Just imagine how things might have been were a quantitative analyst to intervene on that fateful April night at Coachella. “Selena. My analytics indicate that Kylie is going to make a move on Justin after his performance. Only you can stop this. It’s not too late!”

Typical google image search result for “big data”

“The market is a manifestation of life,” writes Anton Vaino in his 2012 journal article “The Capitalisation of the Future.”^* As such, Vaino argues that markets are governed by their own DNA, a hidden set of rules he calls the “market code.” You can think of the market code as a sort of decoder ring for capital markets, or as Vaino helpfully describes it: “a holographic bundle of information on the mechanisms of time’s transformation into space and space into time.” Learn the code, he claims, and you can accurately predict how markets will behave. So every investment you make will be guaranteed to net you cash.¹

The technical term for this process, best exemplified in the Rich Biff timeline in Back to the Future II, is cha-chinggg. But don’t worry folks, Vaino isn’t greedy, his plan is for Russia to profit off the future “strictly in the amounts required to prevent the oncoming crises.”¹

Great! But still, markets are ludicrously complex. “The dynamics of development of the global economic system swiftly transfers it from a complex state to a supercomplex state,” writes Vaino, “as a result of which there is a brisk increase of crisis proneness of nodes in the rapidly forming networks in all sectors: financial, economic, trade, social and military.”¹ Crisis prone nodes or not, nobody has ever built a model that could accurately predict market behavior. This is in part because there are just so many factors—so much data—that need to be considered. This is where the nooscope comes in.

“[Isaac] Newton invented the telescope, [Antonie van] Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope, and we invented the nooscope — a device of the material Internet that scans transactions between people, things and money,” – co-inventor Viktor Sarayev, The Moscow Times

“To record the visible and the invisible, a nooscope was invented in Russia in 2011″¹

At its most basic level “the nooscope is a device that consists of a network of spatial scanners meant for the receipt and record of changes in the biosphere and human activity.” The spatial scanners are fed with data from a “global hypernet” of self-organizing scattered sensors.¹

Like your parents after they bought their first PVR, these scanners record literally everything. “The nooscope’s sensory network…undoubtedly identifies events in space and time,” writes Vaino.¹ This is what gives the nooscope its predictive power. Because markets are influenced by so many factors, the only way you can fully account for all the “inputs” that affect market behavior is to record every single human behavior.

Translated image from “The Capitalisation of the Future”¹

We’re talking about blanketing the earth with networks of video and audio recorders, GPS, temperature and radiation sensors, passive identification markers, smart dust, you name it. In fact, if you really want to understand the psychology behind market fluctuations, you have to go beyond external events and record people’s thoughts. To that end Vaino describes an intriguing “emotion transmission system” described below:

“If the carried identifier [your smartphone, say] is in the reading machine’s area for 0.5 seconds, then event 1 is generated. If the carried identifier is in the reading machine’s area for 1 second, event 2 is generated. If the carried identifier is in the reading machine’s field for 1 second, and its appearance is recorded once more in 1 second, then event 3 is generated. The template database will record, for example, the following data: Event 1 — I like it, Event 2 — I don’t like it!, Event 3 — I’ll return here!”¹

“My god emotion-event-template-database-analyser, it’s like you’ve known me my whole life!”

“The emotion transmission system allows to broadcast the excitement of sports victories, the bitterness of life situations, trust towards socio-economic reforms and so on to the social networks and information-communication Internet services.”¹

Of course, who among us hasn’t wished to broadcast the bitter pain felt during certain “life situations” to our friends and internet services? I know I have. And if this system also benefits the schemes of a small group of dispassionate Russian technocrats, so much the better.

So to recap: the nooscope is an unfathomably huge global monitoring system that uses vast networks of self-organizing distributed sensors to record the entirety of human behaviour and thought in order to predict market behavior—but it’s also so much more. What I’ve just outlined is really only the first of the nooscope’s seven layers, which Vaino likens to a “Russian matryoshka doll.”¹

Illustration of the nooscope’s seven concentric sub-spheres¹

I could go on about each of the six other sub-matryoshka’s but I’m sure you all have places to be, websites to visit, push notifications to dismiss. Suffice to say each outer layer further refines the information gathered by the sensor network. At the outermost layer lies “collective consciousness,” the noosphere itself.¹

In his 1959 book The Future of Man, Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin argues that human minds are evolving towards greater complexity and will one day merge to form a unified collective consciousness.² A similar idea is expressed today by singularity advocates, who claim that imminent technological advances will give us the power to fuse our minds with machine intelligence, creating a so-called “Global Brain Mindplex,” a “system specifically intended to collect together the thoughts of all the people on the globe, and synthesize them into grander and more profound emergent thoughts.”³

Is Vaino’s nooscope the first step towards this brave future, where thoughts are harvested by benevolent super-robots?

On the one hand, sure. If the nooscope is truly capable of recording and distilling the sum total of human thought, it doesn’t seem too far off to suggest that such a device could come up with novel, emergent insights from its data—insights which you could in some sense claim to be the product of our collective global consciousness. On the other hand, Vaino’s impenetrable writing style and bizarre use of explanatory graphics like the one below seem a little—crazy. The lack of any concrete evidence for the existence of his nooscope doesn’t help, despite his claim that it is “described in over 50 patents.”¹

Translated image from “The Capitalisation of the Future”¹

Still, on the third hand—assuming some sort of three-handed rhetorical monster—maybe Vaino’s eccentricities are less the result of incompetence than evidence of a mad genius, one that simply can’t be bothered to proof-read or fact-check his work.

Scientists speak in a rarefied jargon and the same is doubly true of mad scientists. While the rank and file are forced to contend with trivialities like sentence structure, syntax, and logic, the mad genius is simply in too much of a rush to care. If he was to stop, even for a single second to reflect on the meaning of what was said, the scientist would waste precious energy, and thus risk depriving the world of revolutionary new discoveries. Who knows how much more we’d know about alternating current if Nikola Tesla hadn’t wasted so much time checking his manuscripts for comma-splice errors?

And more to the point, what does Vaino’s inclusion in Putin’s inner circle mean for science in Russia more generally? After all, Anton Vaino is Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff. He’s the man who sets Putin’s daily agenda, carries out his presidential orders, and, in stolen moments on particularly stressful days, squeezes Putin’s paw and coos softly to his ear: “It’s OK Mr. President. Everybody thinks you’re doing just fine.” What does it mean to have a literal mad scientist like Vaino sitting at Putin’s side every day? Does it signal a return to the fabled golden age of Soviet mad science, when ape-men and two-headed dogs roamed the earth?

If that seems far-fetched, just look at what Putin is actually doing. Currently Moscow State University scientists have to vet their papers with the state security service before they can publish. While private research funding has become increasingly treacherous as Russia cracks down on civil liberties. On top of that, just days after promoting Vaino to his current position, Putin appointed a church historian as the country’s new science and education minister, instead of a—umm—scientist.

Science in Russia today is starting to resemble the same sort of ideologically-driven system, where science is controlled by government officials who know nothing about science, that led to the proliferation of madmen and cranks during the Soviet era.

“But he looks like such a nice man” – some aunt

At the same time, Putin’s revival of Soviet nostalgia has brought about a change in public opinion surrounding some of Soviet Russia’s chief cranks. Stalin darling Trofim Lysenko, infamous for his totally unfounded claim that you could train crops to grow in the wrong season, is being held up by many, in light of recent discoveries in epigenetics, as a man ahead of his time. “Lysenko Is Confirmed by Modern Biology,” writes one revisionist. Forget the fact that Lysenko didn’t believe in molecular genetics, imprisoned and killed scientists who disagreed with him,⁴ and that his disastrous practices contributed in no small way to the Great Chinese Famine, which killed upwards of 40 million people.⁵

Also this.

Yes it seems there may be no better place for a budding mad scientist like Vaino to strut his stuff than Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Maybe his success will inspire the next generation of Russian mad scientists, still in their infancy, to drop the rattle and pick up the radium-infused ray gun. If only there was some fanciful device that could predict it.

Another translated Vaino graphic. They say a picture is worth a thousand words.¹

Sources:
1. Vaino, A. E. (2012). The Capitalisation of the Future. Economic and Law Issues, (4), 42–57. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@PatrickWStanley/anton-vaino-vayno-vladimir-putins-newly-appointed-chief-of-staff-wrote-a-pretty-far-out-585e90cfaec4#.jhm8ndvmw
2. Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1959). The Future of Man. Doubleday.
3. Goertzel, B., & Bugaj, S. V. (2006). The Path to Posthumanity: 21st Century Technology and Its Radical Implications for Mind, Society and Reality. Academica Press.
4. Birstein, V. J. (2013). The Perversion Of Knowledge: The True Story Of Soviet Science. Perseus Books Group.
5. Dando, W. A. (Ed.). (2012). Food and Famine in the 21st Century (p. 204). Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO.

*The Kremlin-sponsored news agency Sputnik News has tried to sow doubt as to whether the AE Vaino who helped invent the nooscope is indeed Putin’s Anton E. Vaino, despite reporting from The Moscow Times and Kommersant which indicate that they are almost certainly one and the same. After reading the article it’s not hard to see why the Kremlin would want to distance themselves from it.

The post Anton Vaino: One Nooscope to Rule Them All appeared first on Mad Scientist Blog.

Babbage developed a digital computer a full century before computers were even a thing. And he did it without transistors, without circuits, without electricity—we’re talking rods and gears here people.

Just as there’s no rule that technically prevents a Golden Retriever from playing basketball, there’s no physical law that says you can’t build a PC out of any old junk that implements basic logic. Want to build a computer from paperclips? Billiard balls? Tinker toys? It’s been done. How about DNA nucleotides? Swarms of crabs? Yawn! Move over infinite monkeys writing Shakespeare. If you put enough trained monkeys in a big enough room, they could calculate the first million digits of Pi.

The only catch is that your computer will be slow, enormous, stupidly expensive, and in the monkey example, teeming with parasites.

The story of Babbage’s computer begins, as all great stories do, with a series of tedious mathematical tables. In those days, tables of figures (cosines, logarithms, etc.) took hundreds of hours to produce and were more error prone than a greased gorilla playing shortstop.¹ What’s more, unlike said gorilla, Britain’s navy relied on such tables for navigation.¹ Nothing spoils tea like inadvertently sinking your fleet on a sunken reef.

This 5-ton "fragment" is the only part of the Difference Engine Babbage ever built.

Fortunately, there’s a trick to doing all these calculations. The method of finite differences lets us break down complicated trig and log tables into simple addition. Instead of paying some asshole mathematician a mint and a half to calculate thousands upon thousands of equations on his lonesome, you could use the method of finite differences to break your table of equations into basic addition operations, and hire an army of 5-year-olds who’ll add it all up for crackers and juice.

It sounds like the perfect crime, but still, addition is not foolproof. What if Billy shoves a counting bean up his nose and the entire Royal Navy winds up in Madagascar? Babbage convinced the government to let him build a giant adding machine—a Difference Engine—to sum up lengthy mathematical tables automatically.¹ This way there’d be no room for error.

The stars were aligned for the dawn of the computing age. And then everything fell apart. Babbage’s chief engineer turned out to be a total dick, and the government turned skittish over rising production costs.¹ By 1834, all Babbage had to show for himself was a set of detailed designs and a mysterious five-ton “fragment.”¹ After ole’ Mama England snapped her purse strings shut, you might have thought our friend would have took a hint.

But noooooo. Freed from the talons of government investment, Babbage only went crazier. Science shows that while many of our mental faculties diminish with age, the “mad” faculty, overrepresented in the brains of mad scientists, only grows stronger, owing to the peculiar chymikal properties of the bodilie humours involved.

This Difference Engine was constructed in the 1990s for former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myrhvold, based on Babbage's designs. It works just as Babbage intended.

This is where things really start to get hairy. The Difference Engine could calculate a single series of equations. But Babbage began to wonder, what if you built an even more ridiculously large machine—an Analytical Engine—that could calculate anything at all?² And what if you added a punch card system to let users program the machine without getting their hands dirty.² While were at it, how about basic memory so it could store and retrieve data?² What would you have then?!

If you built a machine that did all that, you’d essentially have modern computer, theoretically capable of running solitaire, asking Jeeves, storing porn, or performing any of the other millions of critically important tasks we rely on our computers for—only very slowly.

What’s that? You want to see the Analytical Engine? Nnnnnnnnnnno. He never finished building it.

Blueprints detailing just one small part of the Analytical Engine.

Soured by the Difference Engine debacle, Babbage became convinced that no one rich enough cared enough to fund his next calculating engine.¹ Instead, he focused on drafting detailed blueprints and prototypes to prove that it could be built.¹ He had the technology. Contemporary scholars agree that Babbage could have finished both the Analytical Engine and the Difference Engine using the tools available to him at the time—provided of course there was someone willing to foot the bill, which would surely have been enormous.² This theory is being put to the test as we speak as contemporary crazyman John Graham Cumming has recently begun constructing a full-scale working version of the Analytical Engine based on Babbage’s designs.

A model of the Analytical Engine's "mill" built by his son Henry. In modern computing terms, this would be the processor.

But why didn’t anybody care enough to fund Babbage’s project? It boils down to the fact that math was even more boring back then than it is today. Even though trig tables still seem dull, we have this implicit understanding that they are critical to many aspects of our lives. But this knee-jerk association between science and productivity is a recent thing.¹

Back in Victorian England, hard science and hard labor rarely met. Even though much of Britain’s wealth was built on its industry, engineering was seen as a lowbrow profession.¹ The idea that a mechanical computer could somehow make Britain’s industry more efficient, just by churning out math equations, was enough to make a man’s carefully curled mustache sproing flat in disbelief.

In addition to inventing the world’s first digital computer, Babbage also deserves to be recognized as the original computer nerd. His eclectic interests, irritating humor, and nitpicky personality helped lay the foundation for modern computer nerdom, as the following miscellany attests:

• At Cambridge Charles founded the Extraction Society, whose sole purpose was to extract any of its members should they wind up committed in an asylum.
• He enjoyed scouring the personal ads for encrypted love missives along with buddies Charles Wheatstone and Lord Playfair. Together the gang made a game of cracking secret lovers’ codes, and were not above placing their own encrypted messages in the paper advising couples to “avoid rash decisions” and whatnot.³
• In London, Babbage waged a legendary crusade against such “public nuisances” as street music, hoop trundling, and the popular game of tip-cat.⁴
• And then there’s his infamous correction to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous couplet: “Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born”…

I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world’s population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:

Every minute dies a man,
And one and a sixteenth is born

I may add that the exact figures are 1.167, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.⁵

Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter and a close friend of Babbage, was one of the few who actually understood the power of the calculating engines (possibly even better than Babbage did). She's been dubbed the world's first computer programmer on account of an algorithm she wrote for use in the Analytical Engine.

Babbage’s contributions to nerd culture are indisputable. But how should we judge his contributions the development of modern computers nearly a century later?

Oddly, historians hardly bothered analyzing the inner workings of the calculating engines until the 1970s. Only then did they realize the scope of Babbage’s accomplishment was greater than imagined. A number of modern computing concepts like microprogramming, conditional branching, and memory, were developed completely independently by Babbage.^1,3 In some respects, the Analytical Engine offered even greater functionality than the first electronic computers.³ And this was before even a basic theory of computation had been hashed out.

Charles Babbage isn’t a household name, and it’s not hard to see why. He never even came close to completing his magnum opus, and has a mixed track record with his other inventions. The signaling system he invented for lighthouses is still in use today, while his steeple-to-steeple mail delivery funicular and shoes for walking on water never gained much traction.¹ In fact he nearly drowned testing the latter.¹

Still, frustrated ambition and impossibly ahead-of-your-time thinking are precisely the qualities that make for a top-notch mad scientist. Here failure is rewarded, obsession is praised, and public acceptance—punished. We offer no material award, but something even more precious, a chance to be diagnosed with a horrifying disease from which there is no cure. I am speaking of course, of science madness.

Sources:
1. Hyman, A. (1985). Charles Babbage: pioneer of the computer. Princeton University
Press.
2. Bromley, A. G. (1982). Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, 1838. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 4(3), 196–217. doi:10.1109/MAHC.1982.10028
3. Snyder, L. J. (2011). The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four remarkable friends who transformed science and changed the world. Random House Digital, Inc.
4. Shelly, J. (1864) “Street Music (Metropolis) Bill” United Kingdom. Parliament. Edited Hansard. 176. Retrieved from: here
5. Morrison, P. (Ed.). (1961). Charles Babbage and his calculating engines: Selected writings by Charles Babbage and others. Dover.

The post Mad Scientist #16: Charles Babbage appeared first on Mad Scientist Blog.

We don’t diminish the Wright’s legacy paying homage to the gliders, calamitous multiplanes, and giant man-lifting kites, that paved their way—but we do open a door to some pretty funky, Victorian-style derring-do.

Daedalus tests out his ill-fated ornithopter/son.

Much of what we take for granted in modern aircraft—their fixed wings, powered propellers, cockpits, and tails—originated around the turn of the 19th century, in the supple cortical folds of British engineer George Cayley.¹

Would-be flight craft powered by flapping wings have actually been around for much longer.² They’re called ornithopters, a pretty fancy term considering these “machines” are are mostly just some guy with bird feathers glued to his arms, hurtling off a cliff.²

Cayley’s flying machines were definitely a cut above glued bird feathers. The only issue was making them—um—fly. Engines were comically oversized throughout most of the 19th century, and engineers had no real grasp of that mysterious principle of aerodynamic lift.³

At the risk of belaboring a terrible pun, the whole winged flight project was up in the air before it even got off the ground—at least until Otto Lilienthal matriculated onto the scene in the 1870s. Lilienthal launched the first systematic study of wing lift and drag, which proved, among other things, that curved wings work a heck of a lot better than flat ones.⁴

Lilienthal takes off from his manmade hill near Berlin (click on these pictures to view them in their full-sized glory.)

His table of lift and drag coefficients for various wing types made Lilienthal something of a household name (at least within the vanishingly small subset of households engaged in groundbreaking aeronautical research).⁴ They also paved the way for the cooler, more insane stage of his career as a hotshot glider impresario.

Between 1891 and 1896, Lilienthal piloted nearly 2000 successful flights on a variety of homebuilt glider aircraft.⁴ The trips were brief, only 12-15 seconds apiece,⁴ but they added up. Within no time the man had accrued more hours in winged flight than anyone before him in history.⁵

As news of “The Winged Prussian” spread far and (presumably) wide, Lilienthal and his then obscure field of heavier-than-air flight were thrust into the international spotlight. For a parasol-twirling, late Victorian public, and for a budding generation of flight researchers, the airplane began to seem like more than just a castle in the decidedly human-free sky.⁴

Lilienthal hoped the public would overlook the glaring safety deficiencies inherent in his design and join in on the fun.

Sweet air bro!

Lilienthal either preparing to launch or fanning some gigantic, unseen beast.

Two wings now? You scamp!

The idea of signing your kids up for flying lessons at the local flying rink may seem reckless, but this is precisely the sort of trend old Lily hoped to spark. He hoped to turn his death-defying glider experimentation into a national pass time, and thereby entice a more general population of “sport-loving men” to test and improve upon his designs.⁶

“The air is the freest element; it admits of the most unfettered movement, and the motion through it affords the greatest delight not only to the person flying, but also to those looking on. It is with astonishment and admiration that we follow the air gymnast swinging himself from trapeze to trapeze; but what are these tiny springs as compared to the powerful bound which the sailer in the air is able to take from the top of the hill, and which carries him over the ground for hundreds of yards?”⁶

—Otto Lilienthal

Sometimes photos weren't enough.

He makes a pretty compelling case actually, but we’ll never know what might’ve come of it. In 1896 a glider crash left our crazed visionary with a broken spine and possible intracranial hematoma.⁷ Lilienthal died the next day, but not before reportedly uttering his famous last words: “Sacrifices must be made!”⁸

The Wright brothers often cited Lilienthal’s sacrificial flight/grizzly death as the event that inspired them to tackle the airplane,⁴

Yet while Lilienthal’s aerodynamic research quickly galvanized the development of powered aircraft, the gliders he helped invent dropped out of the popular consciousness for the better part of the next century.

In 1971, flight enthusiasts Jack Lambie and Richard Miller held their very first hang gliding “happening” along the acid soaked hills of late Hippie Orange County. Picked up on by Popular Mechanics and National Geographic, among others, the so-called “Otto Lilienthal Meet” witnessed the birth of the modern sport of hang gliding.⁹

Hang gliding maven Richard Miller takes his "Bamboo Butterfly" for a spin.

Aided by aluminium alloys, Dacron sails, and MacReady speed rings, today’s gliders boast stats that would make Lilienthal’s jaw drop (were it not firmly affixed to his maxillofacial musculature). Cross-country pilots can soar from thermal to thermal for hundreds of miles on end whilst battling such arcane dangers as gust fronts and cloud suck. Mysterious polar vortices have even been known to propel sailplane gliders well into the stratosphere, and perhaps someday, to space.

Next time you see someone hurling themselves off a cliff, strapped to what looks like a glorified kite, remember that some German guy was doing the same thing more than a 100 years earlier, with a smattering of sticks and cloth, and even less regard for his own safety. A true mad scientist of the choleric variety, Otto Lilienthal ought to fit right in here on the illustrious, seldom-updated pages of Mad Scientist Blog.

1. Ackroyd, J. A. D. (2002). Sir George Cayley, the father of aeronautics part 1. The invention of the aeroplane. Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 56(2), 167-181.
2. Hart, C. (1985). The Prehistory of Flight. Berkeley, CA: UC Press.
3. Ackroyd, J. A. D. (2002). Sir George Cayley, the father of aeronautics part 2. Cayley’s aeroplanes. Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 56(3), 333-348.
4. Jakab, P. L. (1997). Otto Lilienthal: “The greatest of the precursors.” AIAA Journal, 35(4), 601-607.
5. Stever, H. G., & Haggerty, J. J. (1971). Flight. New York, NY: Time-Life Books.
6. Lilienthal, O. (1895). Flying: Sports and practice. Fliegesport und Fliegepraxis, 4. Retrieved from: http://www.lilienthal-museum.de/olma/el2058.htm
7. Langewiesche, W. (2010). Aloft: Thoughts on the experience of flight. New York, NY: Vintage.
8. Harsch, V., Bardrum, B., & Illig, P. (2008). Lilienthal’s fatal glider crash in 1896: Evidence regarding the cause of death. Aviation, Space, and Evnironmental Medicine, 79(10), 993-994.
9. Wills, M. (1981). Manbirds: Hang gliders and hang gliding. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Check out the Otto Lilienthal Museum website for more info: http://www.lilienthal-museum.de/olma/ehome.htm

The post Mad Scientist #10: Otto Lilienthal appeared first on Mad Scientist Blog.

It would take another 500 years for Europeans to finally ease their attitude toward lifelike automata. In 1739, Jacques de Vaucanson captured the public imagination with his “Defecating Duck,” a bizarre clockwork apparatus that ate food pellets and shat them out the other side. In 1770, Wolfang von Kempelen debuted his mystifying chess-bot (known simply as “The Turk”). The machine would go on to best the likes of Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin.²

Simulating human speech, however, proved a more elusive goal. While Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s robots could be programmed to write and draw pretty much anything, the most advanced mechanical speech synthesizers of the 18th century could utter nothing more than a few select words and phrases. It wasn’t until the early 1840s that an obscure German inventor by the name of Joseph Faber conjured up the very first bona-fide talking head.

In Paris 1783, Abbé Mical produced two rudimentary talking heads that exchanged a set of stock phrases in praise of the king.¹

No joke people. His machine could pronounce any combination of vowels and consonants, in any European language.³ In the hands of a skilled operator, it could laugh, whisper, talk, and even sing!³

Faber accomplished this feat by carefully aping the structure of the human vocal tract. A bellows, pumped by a foot pedal, served as the gadget’s lung. The glottis and mouth were modeled though a complex system of levers, tubes, and shutters, hooked up to a keyboard, and cloaked under the stoney-eyed mask of a human face.

“Euphonia,” as it would later be dubbed, was leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessors. Faber could have promoted his work within the scientific community, or used it as a springboard for practical applications. Instead, he chose to spend the rest of his life as a cheap showman, touring the head across Europe and The United States.⁴

It’s hard to fathom why, since by most accounts he wasn’t much of an entertainer. As theater manager John Hollingshead recalls:

“The Professor was not too clean, and his hair and beard sadly wanted the attention of a barber. I have no doubt that he slept in the same room as his figure – his scientific Frankenstein monster – and I felt the secret influence of an idea that the two were destined to live and die together.”⁵

Hollingshead notes, with particular horror, the machine’s “sepulchral version of ‘God Save the Queen,'” which he quips, “suggested inevitably, God save the inventor.”⁵

The London press turned Faber into a punchline:

“By the way, why should not Lord George Bentick have one of these machines constructed, with a Benjamin Disraeli figure-head, and play upon it himself at once, and spare the honourable Member for Shrewsbury the bother of being his Lordship’s Euphonia?”⁶

Needless to say, Faber’s act failed miserably. In a frenzy of madness and frustration, the sad German hacked and set fire to his life’s work.⁴

"Never probably, before or since, has the National Anthem been so sung. Sadder and wiser, I, and the few visitors, crept slowly from the place, leaving the professor with his one and only treasure - his child of infinite labour and unmeasurable sorrow." -John Hollingshead⁵

Faber belongs to that particular breed of mad scientists who miserably marry themselves to their inventions—the Pygmalions and Promethei of the world, for whom creation is a mere end in itself. Only, marriage is an inappropriate term for the union, as the contract certainly does not terminate at death. In hell the two wretched souls remain forever entwined, plunged into an infinity of torture and despair.

While Faber would rebuild Euphonia once again and resume the touring life, success continued to elude him.

Sometime in the 1860s, guy dropped of the face of the Earth. A few decades later, his head followed suit.⁴

VODER, the world’s first electronic speech synthesizer, premiered at the New York World’s Fair in 1939.⁷ From that point on, speech synthesis has been cast as branch of computational signal processing. Faber’s hand-pumped, human-controlled talking head was doomed to obscurity, perhaps forever.

Elocution specialist Melville Bell was quite taken by Faber's Euphonia, and challenged his young son Alexander Graham to try his own hand at artificial speech synthesis.⁸ A decade later, Aleck invented the telephone. Coinkidink?

It’s a bummer because it would be soooo cool to hear what this thing sounded like. Our ability to build weird shit has increased so dramatically since the 19th century that many steampunk wet dreams are becoming reality. Aviation engineers recently developed a human-powered ornithopter that flies by flapping its wings. Programmer John Graham-Cumming has set out to build a steam-powered, gear-driven, PC (post to come on this most probably). Surely with today’s technology we could even improve upon Faber’s design. Imagine, instead of a clunky keyboard, a sexy sax with a human face stretched over its opening. I can just hear it now: It—must—have been moo—oooonglo—HONK! Eh people?

Recently, there have been a few horrifying attempts (see below) to wire physical models of the human vocal tract to computer controllers.⁹ But thus far, judging by publicity videos, even these fanciful creations seem incapable of producing anything beyond chilling infantilisms.

Ah Joseph, you were ahead of one time and behind another, but perhaps in obscurity you will find salvation. The internet loves its losers, all the more so if they’re frighteningly insane.

1. Hankins, T.L., Silverman, R.J. (1995). Instruments and the Imagination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
2. Riskin, J. (2003). The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life. Critical Inquiry, 29, 599-633.
3. Lindsay, D. (1997). Madness in the Making: The Triumphant Rise & Untimely Fall of America’s Show Inventors. New York: Kondasha America.
4. Lindsay, D. (1997). Talking Head. Invention and Technology Magazine, 13(1). (url: http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/1997/1/1997_1_56.shtml).
5. Hollingshead, J. (1895). My Lifetime: Vol 2. London: Sampson, Low, Marston & Co.
6. Lemon, M., Mayhew, H., Taylor, T., Brooks, S., Burnand, F.C., Seaman, O. (1846). The Speaking Machine. Punch, 11, 83.
7. Dudley, H. (1950). The Speaking Machine of Wolfgang von Kempelen. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 22(1), 151-166.
8. Bruce, R.V. (1973). Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd.
9. Ngo, D. (2010). Video: moaning rubber robot mouth simulates human voices, fuels our nightmares. Retrieved from: http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2010-04/freaky-robot-mouth-simulates-human-voices. (2010, April 19).

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