Griffonage-Dot-Com

In 1788, Georg Theodor Jacob Müller exhibited a “speaking machine” in Erlangen, Nuremberg, and Bayreuth.

We don’t really know who built the first true speaking automaton—that is, a machine that could talk automatically, entirely by itself, once set in motion.

I’m always curious to see how generative AI tools will fare when asked to mimic content from different time periods, and when Google launched Lyria 3 through the Gemini app on February 18, 2026 — just three days ago as of this writing — that’s the first t…

Back in August 2013, a cabinet card came up for auction on eBay, described by the seller as depicting an “exceptionally handsome man with a moustache and mutton chop whiskers.”

One critic calls it “definitely the most hilarious literary experiment of the decade” and “perhaps the strangest form of literary competition ever conceived” — and that’s even before any human being but me has seen any of it yet.

Did you know that The Jazz Singer (1927) wasn’t necessarily the first Al Jolson sound film?

They’re visually striking images and playable musical audio at the same time.

Numerical prompting is a little-known secret weapon for creating interesting AI-generated images and sounds.

What did the generation of Americans who fought in the Second World War believe they were fighting to protect?

Now that “Liberation Day” has finally come and gone and the United States government is imposing heavy tariffs on all imports, it occurs to me that we’ll need some way of marking consumer goods to indicate that a tariff has been paid on them.

An eBay seller recently auctioned two nineteenth-century postal cards, separately, describing each as written in shorthand.

On July 31, 1896, an unusual postal card arrived in Freiburg im Breisgau, then part of the Grand Duchy of Baden within the German Empire.