Just learned that the first AI speech synthesis was done in 1950

I occasionally do research about AI and today I was looking into the history of AI and speech synthesis. I found some videos and web articles that say that in 1950, a man named Franklin Cooper created a speech synthesis machine that looked like some sort of old telephone. It was some kind of mechanical device with a mouth piece and some kind of ear piece, and speech could be produced by manually turning some cranks or levers. It could supposedly produce words like "hello" and "goodbye" and phrases like "please speak up" and "I don't understand you". I looked at the Wikipedia article on Franklin Cooper, and it says he was a phonetician for the U.S. Navy, and speech synthesis was only one of many things he worked on.<br><br>I occasionally read on social media that AI speech synthesis was invented in the 1970s, but it looks like this claim is false. It looks like Cooper's work on speech synthesis may have been a very early experiment that didn't lead to any widespread application, but it looks like the first AI speech synthesis was done in the 1950s.<br><br>I'm not a tech bro, so I don't know much about speech synthesis, but I thought some of you guys might not know about Cooper's work.<br><br>Also, does anyone know what the mouth piece and ear piece looked like? I looked at some videos that showed a picture of an illustration of the machine, but I'm not sure if this was a real picture or a fake illustration.