Jewish Invention Myths: The Print-to-Speech Reading Machine

Raymond (‘Ray’) Kurzweil is a very famous ‘jewish inventor’ who is often credited with creating the Print-to-Speech Reading Machine with his 1976 ‘Kurzweil Reading Machine’ (1) and is frequently included on lists on ‘jewish inventions’ to boast about his achievements. (2)

The truth however is that artificial speech synthesis has a much longer history than most people realise and was first successfully performed by Danish-German polymath Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein in Russia in 1779 (3) and again by German engineer Wolfgang von Kempelen in Hungary in 1791. (4)

While the first electronic speech synthesis device was developed by British scientists in 1922 (5) and was followed by a practical device called the VODER (Voice Operating Demonstrator) developed by Homer Dudley at Bell Labs that was showcased at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. (6)

By 1953 we have the further development of the first format synthesizer called the PAT (Parametric Artificial Talker) by Walter Lawrence and the first full computer-based English language text-to-speech system was developed by Noriko Umeda in 1968 at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Japan. (7)

Indeed, Kurzweil despite his widespread fame didn’t really invent anything significant but rather commercialized extant technology as it was just a ‘reading aid with (an) optical scanner’ and not something especially revolutionary.

All Kurzweil appears to have done is taken the many non-jewish (European, America and Japanese) inventions and innovations in this field and stick an optical scanner unit on it then declare himself a ‘genius’.

In truth he was (and is) just a shrewd and rather unscrupulous businessman: nothing more.

References

(1) For example: https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=1170

(2) For example: https://www.geni.com/projects/Jewish-Inventors/12388

(3) http://research.spa.aalto.fi/publications/theses/lemmetty_mst/chap2.html

(4) Ibid.

(5) Ibid.

(6) Ibid.

(7) Ibid.

(8) Ibid.