Amazing Archival Footage of the 1939 Voder Electronic Speech Synthesizer Demonstration

VintageCG posted some really amazing archival footage that captured a small piece of a day in 1939 when Homer Dudley of Bell Labs in New Jersey, demonstrated his Voder electronic speech synthesizer. The Voder is one of the earliest speech machines documented. This remarkable machine debuted at the 1939 New York World’s Fair and the Golden Gate International Exposition within the same year.

An audio clip with accompanying photos of this demonstration is equally fascinating.

The Voder by Homer Dudley (Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey) was the first device that could generate continuous human speech electronically. The flowing composition of the many speech sounds had to be done manually in realtime on a special keyboard…

via The Awesomer