Amazing!  I too had the same idea, years ago, to make the rumble strips
by toll booths say "Slow Down" or "Wake Up!" or "You need a Coke" or
whatever.  Someone will patent that and make a mint off the state
highway departments.

And yes I got the idea from such a greeting card whose plastic strip
said "Mewwy Kwismahh" more or less.

But what I'm really writing about is the pneumatic and mechanical
speech synthesizer built back around 1870 in England.  It was hand
operated: the "player" worked the bellows while his other hand adjusted
the pitch of the reed and several resonating chambers.  Or maybe the
reed was a monotone fixed pitch.  Anyway, an expert could make it talk,
more or less.  I believe the great Wheatstone made one of these.

I always thought it's a shame no grandson of the great automaton
builders ever fitted this gadget with sets of cams, to produce a set
of canned phrases.  It would have been a true "talking machine", a term
later applied to Edison's simple sound waveform recorder. :-)

Much later, for a World's Fair in the 1930s, Bell Labs built a pair
of electronic versions, and trained two women to play them by hand.
Pulse oscillators and adjustable electronic filter resonators (like
those on the Novachord) replaced the reed and chambers.  All ten
fingers and both feet were very busy on these highly trained operators,
who produced very good speech -- you could understand it without first
knowing what it was saying.

Many years later (I forget when) one of these machines was found in
a dusty loft at Bell Labs, and some engineer took it upon himself to
restore the machine to working order.  His management checked old
records and hunted down one of the original operators, now an old lady,
and brought her to the Labs.  With just a few minutes practice, all her
training came back to her, and she had it talking again!

Now, some cams, or Welte's conductive ink paper roll, or something,
would have made this machine complete.  I don't recall whether the
pitch was variable so it could sing (as in "Daisy, Daisy, ...").  If
such a mechanical song synthesizer had been available as part of the
Seeburgs and Wurlitzer orchestrions, I wonder if they could have held
off the phonograph and radio for a few more years?  No, but it would
have been fun!

Mike Knudsen