Word: speech
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...listeners. Salient passages were also sent into Germany, Italy and France during the nightly "straight news" period from the powerful Daventry transmitter. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who has been soundly scored for months by many Britons for not saying what Mr. Roosevelt did, jumped on the Washington speech for a political free ride. He adopted the Roosevelt sentiments about the aggressor nations...
...press of other nations, varying with the degrees of Government control over them, carried the speech complete, summarized or emasculated. German news-sheets professed to be astonished at Mr. Chamberlain's endorsement of the Roosevelt attack, concluded that the British Prime Minister is now taking orders from Washington. "President Roosevelt apparently expects every Englishman to do his duty," gibed the Berliner Boersen-Zeitung. One German leader to take public note of the fact that the U. S. is now one of the Nazis' chief opponents was Karl Kaufmann, political leader of Hamburg, who warned that...
This curious colloquy took place last week in Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, where engineers of Bell Telephone Laboratories and a trained operator demonstrated a complicated electronic device called Voder (short for "voice operation demonstrator"). Voder creates a variety of sounds resembling human speech closely enough to be easily intelligible. It is intended to flabbergast, enlighten and amuse visitors to this year's world's fairs in San Francisco and New York City...
...Bell Telephone demonstrators took pains to make it clear that Voder does not reproduce speech, like a telephone receiver or loudspeaker. It originates speech at the touch of an operator, synthesizing sounds to form words. The men who built it were able to do so because in their telephone researches they had made a close study of how speech sounds are made by the human larynx, mouth, breath, tongue, teeth and lips. With electrical filters, attenuators, frequency changers, etc. they found that they could produce 23 basic sounds; that intelligible speech could be synthesized from various combinations of these sounds...
Since the fluent production of speech on a keyboard is not so simple as pounding a typewriter, Bell Telephone picked 24 of the cleverest telephone operators from 300 candidates, gave them about twelve months' intensive training as Voder operators. Like concert pianists, they have to keep in trim by practicing several hours a day. The most difficult speech component they must coax out of Voder, and the one that sounds least natural, is the letter l. When someone at last week's demonstration asked for the words "Bell Telephone," they came out something like "Behrw Tehwephone...