[1] Von Kempelen studied law and philosophy in Pressburg, and attended the Academy in Győr, Vienna and Rome, but mathematics and physics also interested him.

Besides Pressburg's native tongues of German, Hungarian and Slavic,[2] von Kempelen also spoke Latin, French, Italian, and later, some English and Romanian, which he learned during his travels in England and assignments in The Banat.

[1] Though he had a long and successful career as a civil servant, von Kempelen was most famous for his construction of The Turk, a chess-playing automaton presented to Maria Theresa of Austria in 1769.

The machine consisted of a life-sized model of a human head and torso, dressed in Turkish robes and a turban, seated behind a large cabinet on top of which a chessboard was placed.

In 1789, he published a book containing his nearly twenty years of speech research, Mechanismus der menschlichen Sprache Nebst Beschreibung seiner sprechenden Maschine.