The Glass Harmonica

The glass armonica is one of the more delightful oddities in music history — a mechanical instrument that produces sound by rubbing wet fingers against spinning glass, like a much more sophisticated version of running a finger around a wine glass rim.

Benjamin Franklin invented it in 1761, after seeing a performer play tuned wine glasses filled with water in London. He figured there had to be a better way than fussing with water levels, so he designed a set of glass bowls of graduated sizes, nested horizontally on an iron spindle, all turned by a foot treadle like a spinning wheel. The bowls' rims stuck out at different points so a player could reach the right one, and the whole thing let one person cover more than two octaves while keeping both hands free to work multiple "notes" — closer to true polyphony than the wine-glass version ever managed. Franklin called it the "armonica," after the Italian word for harmony.

It became a sensation across Europe almost immediately. Mozart and Beethoven both wrote pieces for it, and Marie Antoinette reportedly took lessons on it. But its popularity faded by the early 1800s. Around the 1800s the aristocracy was foundering: with the French Revolution, and Napoleon putting an end to the Holy Roman Empire. This put musicians out of work. Being accustomed to eating, they started offering public concerts -- the larger the venue, the more tickets they could sell. The piano, and the instruments of the orchestra we re-engineered to be louder, but there was nothing to be done with with glass harmonica. Reviews of the period say things like "the glass harmonica was lovely -- except we couldn't hear it.".

Various rumors didn't help:: that the instrument caused nervousness, melancholy, and even madness in both players and listeners. Some blamed the lead in the glass or the vibrations transmitted through the fingertips. It didn't help that the discredited Doctor Mesmer had used his own armonica to mesmerize his patients.

It never disappeared completely, though. A handful of builders kept making them, and it's had a small revival since the mid-20th century — you'll hear it in film scores when composers want something eerie or otherworldly (it shows up, for instance, in the soundtrack "Taking Chance"), and a few dedicated performers still tour with it today.