Today, singing wine glasses. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this series
about the machines that make our civilization run,
and the people whose ingenuity created them.
Ben Franklin writes to his
friend Father Beccaria in Italy. Beccaria has sent
a new study of electricity, and Franklin apologizes
for having nothing to send back on the subject.
"However," he says,
it may be agreeable to you, as
you live in a musical country, to have an account
of [a new] instrument that seems peculiarly
adapted to Italian music, especially that of the
soft and plaintive kind.
Franklin plunges into a four-and-a-half-page set of
instructions for building this instrument. He
begins by recalling an Irish inventor who once
arranged wine glasses on a table and filled each to
a different depth. Then he created tunes by rubbing
their rims.
That trick has often been done. You may've seen it,
but it's awkward. You can't play anything very
rhythmical. Franklin wanted to create real music
with rubbed glasses, so here's what he did:
He had a glass-blower make a set of glass
hemispheres ranging in size. Each had a hub with a
hole at the center. The glass tapered outward to
the rim. He then ground each hemisphere until it
played one pitch accurately. Next he mounted all
the hemispheres along a three-foot spindle, from
the lowest tone to the highest.
Now, how to play this Christmas tree of nested
glass bowls? Franklin, of course, mechanized the
process. He mounted a flywheel with an 18-pound
lead rim on one end of the spindle, put the whole
arrangement on a small table, and provided a
foot-treadle to spin the flywheel and the glass
bowls. The performer could now sit at the table,
pedal the machine, and place his fingers on the rim
of successive glass bowls to create a tune. But
there's more. With Franklin, you can always look
for more.
He color-coded the seven notes of the scale with
the seven primary colors. The lowest note was a
bass singer's low G, and it was blue; A was indigo,
B purple, and so on up to a soprano high G.
Franklin tells players to wash the glasses and
their fingers thoroughly, then apply just a bit of
chalk-dust to the fingers. He concludes by saying
that the instrument's tones
... are incomparably sweet,
That they may be swelled or softened at
pleasure,
[that they may be] continued to any length
[and]
that the instrument, being once well tuned, never
again wants tuning.
Franklin fairly glows with pride in his
accomplishment. He's as pleased with this as with
his work on electricity or, later, the U.S.
Constitution. He finishes his letter saying,
In honour of your musical
language, I have borrowed from it the name of
this instrument, calling it the
armonica.
History has largely lost the details of Franklin's
musical instrument and called it a glass harmonica,
thus hopelessly confusing readers. But this was no
mouth organ. It was a truly unique American
invention, which a few people are at last taking up
today, over two hundred years later.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
