Friedrich von Knauss

Friedrich von Knaus, also written Knauss (1724 to 1789), was a German watchmaker and inventor who built clockwork mechanisms able to play musical instruments, write short phrases or carry out other specialised tasks. From 1739 he worked at the Darmstadt court, and in 1749 he became imperial and royal court mechanician. With his brother he produced the Imperial Representation Watch in 1750, and in 1757 he completed a mechanical musician that played the flageolet. His best known constructions were four mechanical speaking heads of 1770, which were not very successful; a prize contest announced in 1779 by the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg on a speaking machine for the five vowels shows how hard that problem remained. He died in Vienna.