Georges Artsrouni
Engineer and early machine translation inventor
Georges Artsrouni was an engineer who filed and received the first patent for a mechanical translator.
Artsrouni was born and grew up in Tbilisi. He studied in St. Petersburg.
In 1932, he created a device that he called a “mechanical brain”. In 1933, he filed and received a patent for it in France.
The mechanical translator was in the form of a paper tape. It was a general-purpose machine with many potential applications. The main application was a mechanical multilingual dictionary.
He then built a second version. In 1937, it won the main prize for mechanography at an exhibition in Paris.
In the same years, Petr Troyanskii independently filed a patent in Moscow.
In the 1960s, the device was acquired by the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Paris.
See also
- Les machines à traduire de Georges Artsrouni, Maurice Daumas, Revue d’histoire des sciences, 1965