Benjamin Franklin invented a musical instrument, and Mozart wrote for it.
In 1761 Franklin mounted 37 glass bowls on a spinning rod and played them with wet fingers. The glass armonica sounded, as one listener said of its forerunner, like a cherub in a box. Mozart and Beethoven wrote for it. Then rumours spread that it drove players mad.
Rubbing a wet finger around a wine glass to make it sing is an old trick. In the 1740s the Irish musician Richard Pockrich performed in London on water-tuned goblets, and Franklin's friend Edward Delaval refined the idea. After hearing Delaval play at Cambridge in 1761, Franklin designed something new. Working with a London glassblower, he nested 37 bowls of graded size horizontally on an iron spindle, turned by a foot pedal. The player touched the rims with moistened fingers, and could sound up to ten notes at once. The rims were painted different colours for different notes.
Franklin named it the armonica, after the Italian word for harmony, and wrote that its tones were incomparably sweet and could be held as long as you liked. It became a fashion. More than 100 composers wrote for it. Mozart composed two pieces for it in 1791, Beethoven used it in 1814, and Donizetti wanted it for the mad scene of Lucia di Lammermoor, though he had to rewrite the part for flutes.
Its decline has attracted legends. Some German writers warned that it over-stimulated the nerves and plunged players into melancholy, and a few players' illnesses were blamed on it, though Franklin and many others lived long lives. A modern version claims players were poisoned by lead in the glass. There is no known scientific basis for lead poisoning from touching lead glass, and in that era people absorbed far more lead from medicines, cookware and paint, including the paint on the bowls.
The likelier explanation is duller. The armonica was quiet and fragile, and it could not fill the larger concert halls of the 19th century. By 1820 it had largely vanished from public performance. An original Franklin instrument survives at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, donated by descendants whose children, the story goes, enjoyed breaking the bowls with spoons.
Source: Wikipedia — Glass harmonica · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
