Up for auction a RARE! "Cymograph" Robert Willis Hand Written Letter Dated 1851. 

ES-4961E

The Reverend Robert

Willis (27 February 1800 – 28 February 1875) was an English academic.

He was the first Cambridge professor to win widespread recognition as a mechanical engineer, and

first set the scientific study of vowels on

a respectable foundation, but is now best remembered for his extensive

architectural writings, including a four-volume treatise on the architecture of

the University of Cambridge. Willis was born in London, a grandson of Francis Willis, studied in

1822–1826 at Gonville and

Caius College, Cambridge, from which he received his B.A., and in

1827 was ordained deacon and priest. In 1828 and 1829 he published two early papers

on the mechanics of human speech, namely "On vowel sounds, and on

reed-organ pipes" and "On the Mechanism of the Larynx". In 1830

he was made a Fellow of the Royal

Society. From 1837–1875 he served as Jacksonian Professor

of Natural Philosophy at Cambridge, and from 1853 onwards he

was a lecturer in applied mechanics at the government school of mines. In 1843

Willis became a member of the Royal Archaeological

Institute, in 1855 served as vice president of the Paris Exposition,

and in 1862 received the Royal Gold Medal in architecture. He died of bronchitis in 1875 at Cambridge, where his papers are

archived at the Cambridge University

Library. Even before attending college, Willis invented an improvement

to the harp pedal and in 1821 published An attempt to

Analyze the Automaton Chess Player. He later invented the odontograph (1837)

which became widely used, and the cymograph (1841)

which did not. In 1841 he published his Principles of Mechanism,

and in 1851 A System of Apparatus for the Use of Lecturers and

Experimenters in Mechanical Philosophy, as well as many works on medieval

architecture and the mechanical construction of English cathedrals, notable for his incisive decompositions of

these structures' functional and decorative aspects. He willed his manuscript

on the Architectural History of the University of Cambridge to

his nephew John Willis Clark who

completed it. Willis's theory of vowel production assumed a close

correspondence between vowel production and the production of musical notes

using an organ: the lung acted as a bellows, the vocal folds acted as the reed,

and the mouth cavity acted as the organ pipe. Different vowels corresponded to

mouth cavities(/organ pipes) of different lengths, which were independent of

the properties or vibrations of the vocal folds(/reed). Willis's 1830 paper

"On vowel sounds, and on reed-organ pipes" is usually given as the

reference for this theory, and is often contrasted with Wheatstone's "harmonic"

theory of vowel production. Russell devotes two

chapters to the discussion of these two theories in his 1928 book on The

Vowel, and Willis and Wheatstone figure prominently in the discussion of

vowel theories given by Tsutomu Chiba and Masato Kajiyama in their 1941 book of

the same name (Tokyo: Tokyo-Kaiseikan).