Darwin’s grandfather was also called Darwin and moreover, he stuttered. I say it to avoid what they call the ‘charm of the biography’; is to explain the whole life of a person, his ideas and goals with a concrete fact of his biography. In this case, of course, it is necessary; because Erasmus Darwin, besides being an excellent doctor, an innovative botanist, and a mediocre poet, One of the greatest linguists of the 18th century.

And if it’s not enough lost £1,000 (from 1770) against one of the key figures in the invention of the steam engine and the birth of the industrial revolution, by Matthew Boulton.

In the beginning was the Word

The obsession and level of curiosity the tongue evoked in him made him have to put a cylinder in his mouth for months to find it. where exactly sounds occur in the mouth. He has made incredible progress. In fact, in one of his major books (‘The Temple of Nature’), he published what is considered “the first recorded example of an instrumental phonetic work in a speaker”.

Among his findings, he identified 13 features that differentiate all human voices and developed a whole theory about the origin (on and phylogenetics) of language. It was when Boulton raised the bet: If he knew so much about language, this wouldn’t have happened. it’s hard for him to build a machine that can pray out loud

Boulton and Darwin knew each other; actually they were old friends. In fact, the former was well aware of the latter’s technological ingenuity: for the Boulton offices, the good old Erasmus Darwin had created a small pre-copier with the bubbling industrial world of Birmingham. But even he did not believe that Darwin could succeed.

What happens is that Darwins are very stubborn.

In the “Temple of Nature”, Erasmus described his machine in great detail: “I designed a wooden mouth with soft leather lips and for the nostrils, the back of which can be opened and closed quickly with the pressure of the fingers.” .

“The sounds were delivered by a silk ribbon an inch long and a quarter inch wide stretched between two lightly carved smooth pieces of wood; so that when a light bellows air was blown into the edge of the band, it gave a pleasant tone as the wood vibrated between the edges like a human voice.”

Sounds a bit abstract and we don’t have a prototype reaching us. information stack was more than enough to reconstruct. With mixed results, yes. According to Darwin, “this head pronounced the vowel p, b, m, and a. He did this so gracefully that when he pronounced words like mother, father, map, pam, he unseemly fooled anyone who heard him. And as far as we know, this was true. .

A truly impressive development has been discussed: the 1770 loquendo. was not enough to win the bet this required the machine to be able to “pray”; or rather, reading sentences more complex than those that can be composed with such a limited repertoire of sounds.

I’ve always wondered who Erasmus Darwin was. very unknown. It is true that none of his inventions were patented, as he felt that his role as an inventor might tarnish his reputation as a doctor, but his work developed numerous scientific and philosophical ideas (including the evolution his grandson would take). maximum expression). In a family with so many geniuses per square metre, I imagine the old phrase “a few Erasmus and grandmothers gave birth” (from Darwin, of course) makes perfect sense.

Image | Molly Fletcher and Tom Wilkinson (via Erasmus Darwin House) | Documentation Project of the Science and Industry collections at Birmingham Museums Trust