A Chinese mouth organ sparked the pump organs of Victorian parlours
Europe had no idea how a free reed worked until a Chinese instrument called the sheng reached Russia in the early 18th century. That tiny vibrating tongue of metal led to the harmonium, millions of American parlour organs, and the hand-pumped harmonium now heard in qawwali and kirtan across South Asia.
A pump or reed organ makes sound by forcing air past thin metal strips that vibrate freely in a frame. The sheng drew attention in Russia through a player named Johann Wilde, and the idea travelled west. Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein, a physiology professor in Copenhagen, is credited with the first Western free-reed instrument, winning a prize from the St. Petersburg Academy in 1780, and Abbé Georg Joseph Vogler built the first free-reed organ in Darmstadt from Kratzenstein's concept.
In 1810 Gabriel-Joseph Grenié showed an orgue expressif, so named because it could swell and fade. Alexandre Debain refined the design and patented it as the harmonium in 1840. Hector Berlioz discussed it in his treatise on orchestration and wrote a part for it, played offstage, in L'enfance du Christ; Franz Liszt played that part at a Weimar concert on 21 February 1855.
America took a different route. A mechanic from Jacob Alexandre's French factory emigrated and devised a bellows that sucked air in rather than blowing it out, and after 1885 the Boston firm Mason & Hamlin adopted it, making it the American norm. From the 1850s to the 1920s, several million reed organs and melodeons were made in the United States and Canada. Cheaper and more portable than pipe organs, they filled small churches and homes, though their volume and range were limited. The word melodeon even became slang for Victorian concert saloons catering to men.
Harmoniums also suited colonial export. Lighter and sturdier than pianos of similar size, they held their tuning in heat and humidity, and some export models were treated with chemicals against woodworm and tropical pests. In India, the design was adapted in the 19th century into a compact hand-pumped instrument that is now central to Sikh, Hindu and Muslim devotional music, Indian classical music, and Western yoga circles.
Source: Pump organ
