Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
- Benjamin Franklin invented the glass harmonica, inspired by the parlor trick of playing music on water-filled glasses.
- The instrument gained popularity among classical composers, but fell from favor after rumors linked it to madness.
- The supposed dangers were likely myths, and practical issues like fragility better explain the instrument’s decline.
This story is a collaboration with Popular Mechanics.
Founding Father Benjamin Franklin is responsible for many inventions that we’ve now come to rely on. From bifocal glasses to the lightning rod to the Franklin stove, his many innovations have evolved to serve modern-day life. But did you know he also created a musical instrument?
While not as famous as some of his other creations, Franklin crafted the glass harmonica, otherwise written as the glass armonica since. He preferred this Italianized spelling since he felt the instrument was “peculiarly adapted to Italian music, especially that of the slow and plaintive kind.”
But the glass harmonica actually caused quite stir in 18th-century society when Franklin brought it to the European music community. Indeed, the fact that it caused such a stir is precisely the reason it’s forgotten today. The instrument actually caused a moral panic in its time—some were convinced it could hypnotize listeners, or even drive them to madness.
Though the instrument would go on to be incorporated into the works of masters like Mozart and Beethoven, Franklin was first inspired to create the glass harmonica because of a parlor trick. “You have doubtless heard the sweet tone that is drawn from a drinking glass, by passing a wet finger round its brim,” he wrote to the physicist Rev. Father Beccaria in a July 1762 letter.
An Irishman whom he identified as “Mr. Puckeridge” had made a practice of playing songs, Franklin noted, after he assembled “a number of glasses of different sizes, fixed them near each other on a table and tuned them by putting into them water more or less as each note required.” Franklin was likely referring to Richard Pockrich, an Irish musician who toured England and Ireland with his “angelic organ” of assembled glasses, playing the works of Handel amongst other tunes. Pockrich died in a fire in 1759, a fact Franklin acknowledges in his letter.
Franklin had witnessed a recreation of Pockrich’s glass marvel played by a member of the Royal Society, and the performance inspired him. “Being charmed with the sweetness of its tones and the music he produced from it,” he wrote, “I wished only to see the glasses disposed in a more convenient form and brought together in a narrower compass so as to admit of a greater number of tones and all within reach of hand to a person sitting before the instrument.”
Instead of arranging glasses on a table as Pockrich and his imitators had done, Franklin’s glass harmonica instead mounted a series of glass bowls, gradually increasing in size, side-by-side horizontally on a spindle that could be rotated with a pedal. The player could then simply dampen a finger and play tones, in Franklin’s words, “incomparably sweet beyond those of any other.”
Franklin’s invention caught on in the music scene of Europe’s upper crust. After the first public performance of the instrument in 1762 by musical prodigy Marianne Davies, the glass harmonica was incorporated into classical compositions like Mozart’s Adagio and Rondo (K. 617) and Beethoven’s Lenore Prohaska.
But it was the instrument’s association with a different celebrity of the day that may have led to its downfall. The German physician Franz Anton Mesmer, namesake of mesmerism and inventor of the pseudoscientific theory of “animal magnetism,” believed that the vibrations of the glass harmonica could affect the human body. He incorporated the instrument into his “treatments,” and his patients would report the instrument putting them into “trances” or even causing visions. Though no scientific evidence exists to support these claims, then or now, this purported application of the instrument indelibly bound it to something supernatural. Soon rumors began to spread within Germany about the glass harmonica’s unsavory psychic side effects.
The belief that the instrument’s sounds could drive its players, or even its listeners, into madness is exemplified in the writing of the respected academic Johann Friedrich Rochlitz. In the pages of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, a 19th-century music magazine, Rochlitz warned his readers that the glass harmonica “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.”
Of course, in our modern times, we understand that what Rochlitz was proposing is actually quite implausible. So, others have proposed an alternative, more scientifically sound answer for why glass harmonica players would have gone mad: lead poisoning. Because the bowls in the harmonica were made of lead glass, the theory goes, the constant contact with the players’ hands may have caused lead poisoning, which could explain the mental instability and early deaths they supposedly experienced.
That is, of course, assuming there really was such a rash of mental instability and early death—for which there isn’t much evidence. We have some hyperbolic warnings that these outcomes were possible, but few verified cases in which it actually happened. (Marianne Davies died young, but nothing suggests that the instrument was to blame).
In a sense, the “glass armonica madness” problem, whether it was attributed to mesmerism or lead poisoning, wasn’t a real phenomenon so much as an 18th-century predecessor of two types of modern myth: the “pop rocks and Coke killed Mikey from the cereal ad” urban legend on one hand, and “rock and roll records are Satanic” scare-mongering on the other.
The reality is that Franklin’s glass harmonica likely fell out of favor due to more practical reasons, like being tricky to amplify in larger concert spaces and being too fragile to transport from place to place without breaking. The instrument still pops up from time to time in contemporary music, from film soundtracks like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) to Bjork’s 1997 album Homogenic, and of course, acoustic performances by the band Korn.
But Franklin probably wouldn’t sweat the “sweet tone” of his instrument falling to the wayside of musical history. He wound up having a few longer-lasting innovations, after all.
Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.
