This muscial instrument was made by a US Founding Father – and it 'drove people mad'
Have you ever sat around a dinner table or in a pub and rubbed your finger along the rim of a glass to make that eerie ringing noise? The great American inventor made a musical instrument out of the concept, and it was so successful that it was used by Mozart and Beethoven
“Of all my inventions, the glass armonica has given me the greatest personal satisfaction.” That was quite the claim for the American polymath and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, whose long list of inventions also includes the lightning rod, an innovative type of stove, and bifocal spectacles.
Franklin developed the armonica – named for the Italian word ‘armonia’, meaning ‘harmony’ – as a musical instrument that was capable of duplicating the high-pitched, almost ethereal, ringing noise made by rubbing fingers along the top of wine glasses.
What was Franklin’s armonica?
Invented around 1761, the armonica comprised 37 glass bowls of graduated sizes and thicknesses that were lined up in an overlapping horizontal stack on a rotating spindle. The player turned them all at once with a foot pedal, while rubbing their fingers against the rims of the desired bowls to make them ‘sing’.
The beauty of the instrument was that the bowls did not need liquid inside, since they had been made (by London-based glassblower Charles James) to precise specification, so that each produced a different note. The rims were painted certain colours so that the player knew which bowl produced which note. It was possible to play multiple bowls at once, making chords possible.
“Its tones are incomparably sweet beyond those of any other [instrument]; that they may be swelled and softened at pleasure by stronger or weaker pressures of the finger, and continued to any length,” said Franklin. For the rest of his life, he always travelled with the instrument to play at his leisure.
Why was Franklin’s glass armonica so popular?
Around the mid-18th century, musical performances with sets of wine glasses had become popular in England. Franklin was living there at the time, and attended one such performance by his friend, the natural philosopher Edward Delaval.
In the years after its premiere in 1762, the armonica equally became a favourite of numerous musicians and composers across Europe.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his 1791 piece, Adagio & Rondo, K 619, specifically for the instrument.
Other notable names to incorporate an armonica in their compositions were Ludwig van Beethoven, Gaetano Donizetti, Camille Saint-Saëns and Richard Strauss.
Its use has continued into the modern day, heard in music by the likes of movie composer James Horner and the Icelandic singer Björk.
Did Franklin’s glass armonica make people ill?
Yet the armonica’s influence did have consequences that Franklin could not have anticipated. Questions began to be raised over whether its eerie sounds affected people’s health. There was a widespread belief that the high-pitch humming could bring about madness.
One German periodical insisted that those with an illness or nervous disorder should not play the armonica, as it “excessively stimulates the nerves, plunges the player into a nagging depression and hence into a dark and melancholy mood, that is an apt method for slow self-annihilation”.
On the other hand, the 18th-century German physician Franz Mesmer believed the sounds could assist in his therapeutic treatments of the invisible force in every human body, which he dubbed “animal magnetism”.
Akin to hypnotism – Mesmer’s name is where the word ‘mesmeric’ comes from – his treatment used the armonica to create a suggestible, near-spiritual atmosphere for his patients.
Mesmer became something of a celebrity, holding mass treatments for 20 or so people from high society. Mozart had actually first seen the armonica in action during a 1773 visit to Mesmer’s home in Vienna, Austria.
But there was no harmonious end for Mesmer: having moved to France, he would end up being investigated by a royal commission appointed by King Louis XVI, which found that Mesmerism had no scientific or medical basis. Ironically enough, one of the members of that commission was the then US ambassador: Benjamin Franklin.
Authors
Jonny Wilkes is a former staff writer for BBC History Revealed, and he continues to write for both the magazine and HistoryExtra. He has BA in History from the University of York.