Abbot Mical's talking heads
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Before 1780, automatons or androids were able to
perform many physical actions. That year, Abbot Mical was
able to give them speech. Wanting to win the St Petersburg annual
competition which was organised by the Imperial Academy of Sciences,
the clergyman Abbot Mical created two automatons :
talking heads that were able to say several sentences .
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Abbot Mical's talking heads,
two exceptional automatons
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Placed on a pedestal inside a small theatre, a dialogue
took place between the two automatons :
-"The King brings peace to Europe.
-Peace crowns the King with glory.
-And peace makes the people happy.
-O adored King, father of your people, their joy shows Europe
the glory of your throne."
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A report from the Academy of Sciences,
signed by Lavoisier and La Place, among others. Describes the mechanism
that created speech: "The heads covered a hollowed box, whose different
parts were joined together by hinges and that inside of which the
Abbot had placed, artificial glottises of different shapes and sizes,
along stretched membranes. The air which travelled through the glottises
hit the membranes and created low to high-pitched tones; the combination
of which resulted in an imperfect mimicking of the human voice".
The Academy concluded : "We must applaud the efforts made by Abbot
Mical : his machine is ingenious, work such as this deserves encouragement
and though the result is imperfect, it is still merits the approval
of the Academy."
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The little theater and the two talking heads
two extraordinary automatons
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A witness' description of the automatons:
"They are natural in size, very well made; they are golden
in colour, which is in bad taste. They sit side by side in
a little theatre, at the base of which all the mechanisms
are visible. During the four sentences they successively articulate,
imitating the movement of lips, certain words are prononced,
others are mumbled and others are even eaten. The sound of
their voices are husky and their articulation slow. But despite
all these short comings, they say enough, that we cannot deny,
that these heads truly do speak…"
Another witness finishes the description
: "On Temple street, in the Marais, there is a mechanical
of work of art, that is attracting crowds of connaisseurs
… They are two heads made of bronze, which talk and clearly
pronounce entire sentences. They are giant in nature and their
voice is superhuman…"
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"It is not as you may think the
piece of work, of the moment due to trend or luck,but the fruit of
hard word and genius. For thirty years, Abbot Mical prepared the secret
of his work; and if it was possible to follow with the eye all the
steps that led him here, if this skilful creator had kept the tries,
it would have been undoubtedly a gallery of well interesting mechanics
to travel over…" |
"M. Mical placed two keyboards on his talking
heads. The first is a cylinder which only utters a determined
number of sentences, but on which the spaces and prosody of
words are correctly written. The other keyboard contains all
the sounds and the tones of the French language which are
reduced to a small number thanks to an ingenious and particular
method of the creator. With a little habit and skill, it would
be possible to speak with fingers, as easily as with the tongue,
and it would be possible to grant the faces language the speed,
rests and all the appearance of a tongue not driven on by
passions. The foreigners will choose the Henriade or the Télémaque
and will make them recite from one end to the other, by putting
them onto the vocal keyboard as we put opera scores onto the
ordinary harpsichords."
"And we would not hear the quivering of our
elders' harsh articulations.
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Abbot Mical's two talking heads |
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Only the talking heads can keep
this honorable universality of the French language and reassure it
against the instability of the human things, and I dare say it. If
we develop them in Europe, these heads will become the dread of all
these masters of language, Swisses and Gascons, whose countries are
all poisoned and which distort our language among the peoples who
love it." |