The Talking Head of Euphonia
In the 1840s, audiences paid to hear a mask of a woman's face speak and sing, in a slow, flat voice that many found deeply uncanny.
What was reported
Joseph Faber, an inventor from Vienna, spent years building a machine that could speak. Euphonia had bellows for lungs, an ivory tongue, rubber lips and a mechanical larynx, all worked from a keyboard. It was fitted with the face of a woman.
Faber showed it in Philadelphia in 1844 and at the Egyptian Hall in London in 1846. The machine could speak words in several languages and even sing 'God Save the Queen'. Witnesses described the voice as ghostly and the performance as strangely sad.
Explanations offered
Euphonia was a genuine piece of engineering, one of the first machines to imitate human speech, and an ancestor of today's speech synthesis. The uncanny feeling it gave audiences, a voice that's nearly human but not quite, is something people still feel about artificial voices.
- When
- Shown in the 1840s
- Where
- Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, London, England, UK
- Witnesses
- Audiences in Philadelphia and London
- Status
- A real machine
Famous cases are real, widely reported events. Each file sets out what witnesses said and the explanations that have been offered, without taking a side.
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