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


Want to learn more about Georges Artsrouni?


Edit this article →

Machine Translate is created and edited by contributors like you!

Learn more about contributing →

Licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

Cite this article →