Euphonia (device)

A mechanical device that he had reportedly spent over twenty-five years developing, Faber's "Fabulous Talking Machine" was constructed of several different mechanisms and instruments: a piano, a bellows, and a mechanical replica of the human throat and vocal organs. By pressing the keys on the keyboard, a human operator produced sounds that inflated the bellows and caused the mechanical mouth to open, the mechanical tongue to be lifted, and the mechanical jaws to move. Able to produce sentences in English, French, and German, the Euphonia was reported by The London Journal to speak all three with a German accent, a fact attributed to the native language (German) of the inventor. It was P.T. Barnum who renamed the talking machine "Euphonia", which was a striking, if probably coincidental, token of its ideological resemblance to Hector Berlioz' utopia, which bore the same name. The Euphonia was not a novel contraption since it was similar to other automatons invented, particularly those that followed the general mechanics of serial assembly and the specific method of decomposing and reconstituting language through mechanized "scansion". A related technology was John Clark's The Eureka machine, which was invented a year prior to Euphonia's debut. It was, however, designed with a different function, which was to produce hexameters instead of sound. == Exhibition ==

The Euphonia was exhibited with a female mask covering the mechanical mouth, tongue, and jaw and at times with a dress hanging below the mask, the Euphonia would perform for audiences, pretending to respond to or mimic the words of the keyboard operator. During its appearance in London, the automaton was also presented as a man dressed like a Turk. Another account by London theater manager John Hollingshead described the experience as both sad and depressing: "It wanted little imagination to make the very few visitors believe that the figure contained an imprisoned human - or half human - being, bound to speak slowly when tormented by the unseen power outside," and that "no one thought for a moment that they were being fooled by a second edition of the Invisible Girl fraud." ==See also==