Benjamin Franklin's Glass Armonica

Origin
While living in England as a Pennsylvanian diplomat in the 1750s, Franklin stopped by Cambridge University to take in a concert by Edmund Delaval, a professional wine glass player. Delaval arranged a collection of wine glasses on a table, "tuned" them by filling each with a different quantity of water and then played them by carefully rubbing their rims in succession. As the audience soaked up the smooth, ethereal sound of the glasses, Franklin couldn't help but notice room for improvement.

Playing wine glasses is woefully time-consuming to set up -- and hard on the wrists to play. Franklin wracked his brain to figure out he could create music from glass without needing to empty out his kitchen cupboards. Two years of experimentation later, Franklin debuted his glass armonica, a collection of different-sized glass bowls arranged on a rotating shaft. By spinning the shaft with a foot pedal and running wetted fingers over the rotating bowls, Franklin found he could coax out chords and melodies that Delaval could only dream of.

The new instrument was soon making the rounds of parlors and concert halls across Europe and America. Mozart and Beethoven penned music for the new instrument, and Franz Mesmer, a pioneer in hypnosis, used the instrument to guide his patients into deeper trances. In the 19th century, however, the popularity of the instrument died out as a rumour spread that the ghostly sounds it produced could provoke insanity in the listener.

Glass Armonica
The glass harmonica, also known as the glass armonica, bowl organ, hydrocrystalophone, or simply the armonica (derived from αρμονία ("harmonia"), the Greek word for harmony), is a type of musical instrument that uses a series of glass bowls or goblets graduated in size to produce musical tones by means of friction (instruments of this type are known as friction idiophones).

Because its sounding portion is made of glass, the glass harmonica is a crystallophone. The phenomenon of rubbing a wet finger around the rim of a wine goblet to produce tones is documented back to Renaissance times; Galileo considered the phenomenon (in his Two New Sciences), as did Athanasius Kircher.

The Irish musician Richard Pockrich is typically credited as the first to play an instrument composed of glass vessels by rubbing his fingers around the rims. Beginning in the 1740s, he performed in London on a set of upright goblets filled with varying amounts of water. His career was cut short by a fire in his room, which killed him and destroyed his apparatus. A friend of Benjamin Franklin and a fellow of the Royal Society, Edward Delaval, extended the experiments of Pockrich, contriving a set of glasses better tuned and easier to play. During the same decade, Christoph Willibald Gluck also attracted attention playing a similar instrument in England.

The instrument's popularity did not last far beyond the 18th century. Some claim this was due to strange rumors that using the instrument caused both musicians and their listeners to go mad. It is a matter of conjecture how pervasive that belief was; all the commonly cited examples of this rumor are German, if not confined to Vienna.

One example of fear from playing the glass harmonica was noted by a German musicologist Friedrich Rochlitz in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung: The harmonica excessively stimulates the nerves, plunges the player into a nagging depression and hence into a dark and melancholy mood that is apt method for slow self-annihilation. If you are suffering from any kind of nervous disorder, you should not play it; if you are not yet ill you should not play it; if you are feeling melancholy you should not play it. Marianne Davies, who played flute and harpsichord — and a young woman said to be related to Franklin — became proficient enough at playing the armonica to offer public performances. After touring for many years in duo performances with her celebrated vocalist sister was also said to have been afflicted with a melancholia attributed to the plaintive tones of the instrument. 

Marianne Kirchgessner was an armonica player; she died at the age of 39 of pneumonia or an illness much like it. However, others, including Franklin, lived long lives. By 1820 the glass armonica had disappeared from frequent public performance, perhaps because musical fashions were changing – music was moving out of the relatively small aristocratic halls of Mozart's day into the increasingly large concert halls of Beethoven and his successors, and the delicate sound of the armonica simply could not be heard.

For a time the armonica achieved a genuine vogue. Like most vogues, that for the armonica eventually passed. The sound-producing mechanism did not generate sufficient power to fill the large halls that became home to modern stringed instruments, brass, woodwinds, and percussion. That it was glass, and subject to easy breakage, did not help either. 

A modern version of the "purported dangers" claims that players suffered lead poisoning because armonicas were made of lead glass. However, there is no known scientific basis for the theory that merely touching lead glass can cause lead poisoning. Furthermore, historical replicas by Eisch use so-called 'White Crystal' replacing the lead with a higher potash content, many modern devices, such as those made by Finkenbeiner, are made from pure silica glass. Lead poisoning was common in the 18th and early 19th centuries for both armonica players and non-players alike: doctors prescribed lead compounds for a long list of ailments, and lead or lead oxide was used as a food preservative and in cookware and eating utensils. Trace amounts of lead that armonica players in Franklin's day received from their instruments would likely have been dwarfed by lead from other sources, such as the lead-content paint used to mark visual identification of the bowls to the players===Benjamin Franklin=== Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705] – April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, a carriage odometer, and the glass 'armonica'. He facilitated many civic organizations, including a fire department and a university.

Franklin earned the title of "The First American" for his early and indefatigable campaigning for colonial unity; as an author and spokesman in London for several colonies, then as the first United States Ambassador to France, he exemplified the emerging American nation. Franklin was foundational in defining the American ethos as a marriage of the practical values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions, and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment. In the words of historian Henry Steele Commager, "In a Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat." To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin "the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become."

Franklin, always proud of his working class roots, became a successful newspaper editor and printer in Philadelphia, the leading city in the colonies. He was also partners with William Goddard and Joseph Galloway the three of whom published the Pennsylvania Chronicle, a newspaper that was known for its revolutionary sentiments and criticisms of the British monarchy in the American colonies. He became wealthy publishing Poor Richard's Almanack and The Pennsylvania Gazette.

Franklin gained international renown as a scientist for his famous experiments in electricity and for his many inventions, especially the lightning rod. He played a major role in establishing the University of Pennsylvania and was elected the first president of the American Philosophical Society. Franklin became a national hero in America when he spearheaded the effort to have Parliament repeal the unpopular Stamp Act. An accomplished diplomat, he was widely admired among the French as American minister to Paris and was a major figure in the development of positive Franco-American relations.

For many years he was the British postmaster for the colonies, which enabled him to set up the first national communications network. He was active in community affairs, colonial and state politics, as well as national and international affairs. From 1785 to 1788, he served as governor of Pennsylvania. Toward the end of his life, he freed his slaves and became one of the most prominent abolitionists.

His colorful life and legacy of scientific and political achievement, and status as one of America's most influential Founding Fathers, have seen Franklin honored on coinage and money; warships; the names of many towns, counties, educational institutions, namesakes, and companies; and more than two centuries after his death, countless cultural references.

Franz Mesmer
Franz Anton Mesmer (May 23, 1734 – March 5, 1815) sometimes incorrectly referred to as Friedrich Anton Mesmer, was a German physician with an interest in astronomy, who theorised that there was a natural energetic transference that occurred between all animated and inanimate objects that he called magnétisme animal (animal magnetism) and other spiritual forces often grouped together as mesmerism. Mesmerism is considered to be a form of vitalism and shares features with other vitalist theories that also emphasize the movement of life "energy" through distinct channels in the body. In 1843 James Braid, a Scottish physician proposed the term hypnosis for a technique derived from magnetism but more limited in its claimed effects, and also different in its conception. Mesmer's name is the root of the English verb "mesmerize".