The Bell Telephone Laboratories Voder: 1939, the worlds first electronic voice synthesizer

[Justin]

 

The Bell Telephone Laboratories Voder was the worlds first voice electronic synthesizer. In 1939 Homer Dudley working at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey began to publicly demonstrate the Voder, the first electronic device that could generate continuous human speech electronically. The Voder was designed for the 1939 Worlds Fair in New York as a showcase of the advanced work being done at Bell Laboratories. It was a manually operated system requiring training, ten finger, two foot paddles, a knee leaver and arm switch to generate sounds. The sounds quality actually was better than most voice synthesizers all the way up to the late 1990s.

 

 

 

[HDN]

Ah, I've heard of this before, I believe in an 8-Bit Guy episode. It's very interesting.

[Justin]

I forgot I had already posted this, and had it in my "to do list" to make a Vader ..er uh.. Voder post to the Retro forums. Here are some interesting videos I came across this week about the Bell Labs Voder:

 

 

 

 

[Justin]

 

[HDN]

@Justin that replica video was fascinating. That would be a fun thing to fiddle around with for an afternoon.

[Justin]

6 minutes ago, HDN said:

@Justin that replica video was fascinating. That would be a fun thing to fiddle around with for an afternoon.

I agree. It's amazing the things we were doing pre-war in this country, in the 1930s. It's like we understood communications and technology was important, we didn't fully understand the applications fully but we were developing great triumphant things that in hindsight are both cool and a little scary.

[Atari 5200 Guy]

Imagine my surprise when I popped Berzerk in my 5200 and heard, "INTRUDER ALERT!"  Yea...I was shocked.  My 5200 actually spoke.  So to see that electronic speech went as far back as pre-war era is very impressive.  I now know where my 5200 learned to speak.