This kit was the only one I had as a
kid back in the mid 1960's. The original kit disappeared from my possession
some decades ago but I fondly remember building and playing with it for
years. A member of the ATCA club wrote me that he once had four or five of
these kits and ganged them together to produce more complex speech sounds by sequentially
generating a single, but different, sound from each kit.
Photo 1 above shows the kit with the
lid removed from the box and the book and slide rule laying next to the box of
parts. Photo 2 shows the bottom of the box turned over. The
pictorial schematic with pre-punched holes for mounting the terminal hardware is
visible here. Photo 3 shows the parts removed from the box. Photo 4 shows
the components removed from their plastic bags (powdered iron cores for coils
not shown) and the mounting of the hardware on the "circuit
board". As with most
other thumbnail images on these web pages, clicking on one of the images above
will display the full- size image.
An ebay seller sent me some photos
of her kit that differs a little from mine. Although the copyright on the
box says 1963, hers was actually made in or after 1969 judging by the Bell
logo. The Bell logo changed in 1969
to what is still used today by some Regional Bell Operating Companies in the
USA. To view the collection of pictures, click
HERE.
Unlike the other three kits, I have
scanned the entire book that came with this kit and have made it available via
the links on this page as follows:
Side Note: In this book there is mention of the VOCODER.
It's predecessor, the Voder, was a manually-operated deviced "played" like a
piano or typewriter to create human voices. The Voder predates the Vocoder by a
year or two, but both were the from the genius of Homer Dudley. The Vocoder is
actually what Dudley was aiming to build -- an electronic device that could
reduce the bandwidth of speech, without affecting its intelligibility. The Voder
helped him model the human vocal tract. (Thanks to Gordon McComb for this
information)
The kit also came with a "slide
rule" for calculating resonance frequencies of inductor/capacitor tuned circuits
called a "Resonance Computer". A scan of this item is viewable by clicking
HERE.
Bell Labs is still doing research in
Speech Synthesis and a newer technology of Speech Recognition. Please
visit their neat web page where you can here your text input converted into
speech (click here).
A sample of synthesized singing from the Bell Labs on-line speech synthesizer
can be heard by clicking
HERE.
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