Johann Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen de Pázmánd (Hungarian: Kempelen Farkas) (23 January 1734 – 26 March 1804) was a Hungarian[1][2][3][4] author and inventor with Irish ancestors.
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Kempelen was born in Pressburg, Kingdom of Hungary, Habsburg Empire (Pozsony in Hungarian, since 1919 Bratislava and since 1993 Slovakia). The Kempelen family settled in Pozsony/Pressburg in 1640. He is supposed to have been of Irish ancestry, but the name Kempelen itself is Hungarian. Kempelen's father, of noble ancestry, was Engelbert Kempelen (1680–1761). Kempelen's mother was Ágnes Mohai.
Kempelen studied law and philosophy in his birthplace, and then in Győr, in Vienna and in later Rome, but Mathematics and Physics also interested him. He spoke German, Hungarian, Latin, French, Italian, and later also English. He started to work as a clerk in Vienna. He was most famous for his construction of The Turk, a chess-playing automaton, later revealed to be a hoax. It was described in an essay by Edgar Allan Poe, "Maelzel's Chess-Player". He also created a manually operated speaking machine,[5][6][7][8] which was a genuine pioneering step in experimental phonetics. He constructed steam-engines, waterpumps, a pontoon bridge at Pozsony (1770), patented a steamturbine (1788/89) for mills, a typewriter for the blind (1772) Vienesse pianist Teresia Paradis, a theatre house in Buda (inaugurated October 25, 1790) (now Budapest) and the famous fountains at Schönbrunn Vienna. The reconstruction of the demolished Buda castle was also partly led by him. He was also a talented drawer, etcher and wrote also poems and epigrams. He composed a singspiel, Andromeda and Perseus, performed in Vienna.
He was married twice, and had five children from the second marriage, of whom two survived into adulthood. He died poor because the Austrian emperor withdrew his economic support. Kempelen died in Vienna. The Wolfgang von Kempelen Computing Science History Prize was named in his honor.
Regarding personal names: Ritter is a title, translated approximately as Knight, not a first or middle name. There is no equivalent female form.
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