Let’s give monkeys prosthetic noses so that they can talk like humans, thought drunk scientists in 1905. From a story in that year’s New York Times:

“W. Reed Blair, the animal physician at the Bronx Park Zoo, and several other scientists have come to the conclusion that the only reason a monkey cannot talk like a human being is his nose. They have found that a monkey’s vocal chords and the general contour of his head are the same as a man’s, but the nose is different. They say that it is too flat to allow a monkey to articulate like a man. They propose to remedy this by a gutta-percha nose and to experiment with the artificial nose on August, the latest orangutang which has arrived at the Bronx Zoo. Later similar experiments will be tried on Duhong, another orangutang, and Soko and Polly, two chimpanzees.

Keeper Reilly, who says he has taught the monkeys to do everything but talk, has volunteered to be their language teacher. The keeper will begin to teach August his A B C as soon as the new nose arrives. Monkeys are very quick in imitating, and it is believed that with the right kind of nose they will be able to imitate the sound of the human voice. August will be taught to talk just the same as a child in school.

The scientists got the idea of a gutta percha nose from a well-known professor who has studied monkeys and the supposed monkey language for the last fifteen years in the Congo. Some years ago the professor met a man whose nose had been shot off in a battle. The man was able to talk only by forming a cone with his hands over the place where his nose had been. The professor reasoned that a monkey was in about the same condition as a man with his nose shot off, and has been working on the theory of an artificial nose since.”