History of the
(Short Version)

Various instruments have been made of porcelain cups; all of them played by tapping them with sticks, some of them tuned with water. None of them were played with the 'wet-finger-around-the-wine-glass' technique, which apparently simply can't be done with a porcelain glass.

Glass-making goes back to about 2500 B.C.E., generally credited to either Egypt or the Mesopotamian region. Early glass manufacture used casting techniques of various sorts.

But all that changed in the 1st century C.E. when some unknown glass artisan in Syria put one end of a metal pipe into some molten glass and blew, and glassblowing was invented. It greatly expanded the range of things that could be made, and it was also a much quicker technique than casting, so it also improved the economics of making glass objects. The Romans were especially enthusiastic about objects made by glassblowing, and spread that technology throughout their empire.

The area around Venice proved to be particularly friendly to glass industry, as it had a good harbor which make trade throughout Europe much easier, and it had sand and ferns that were particularly suited to glassmaking.

Although glass goblets had been made since Roman times, apparently they weren't inclined to make the walls thin enough to sing. (For one thing, thicker glasses hold up much better in shipping and use.) But around 1450 a new type of glass was invented, called cristallo, which lent itself to thinner walls, and suddenly 'thin was in!' Venetian wineglasses became all the rage amongst the nobility —definitely an indulgence for the wealthy as these Venetian glass objects cost more than an equivalent one made of gold. They were so expensive that a noble or wealthy house would have only one wine glass; the steward would fill it in front of each guest, who would drink its contents; the steward would then wipe out the glass and repeat the process with the next guest.

The first mention of the 'wet-finger-around-the-wineglass-rim' is by Francis Bacon (in 1627) and next by Galileo, in his Two New Sciences (1638), the book which he wrote under house arrest in which he arguably founds modern physics. Both men were closely associated with the wealthy so they would have access to a wine-glass, and both only mention using one glass—not surprising considering the high cost of even one.

Early accounts of using multiple wine glasses, notably Harsdoerfer in Germany and Kircher in Rome, are plagued with physical impossibilites, so one wonders if they ever actually tried the experiments they describe. (Perhaps too expensive for anything more than a 'thought experiment'?) And neither of them describes playing melodies.

The extreme cost of wineglasses plummeted in England between about 1650 and 1750. A perfect storm of a thriving British Empire, changes in patent law, having to switch to coal because they were running out of wood for fuel, the commercialization of lead-glass—all resulted in wine glasses becoming inexpensive and common by about 1750. A tax on glass by weight in 1745 motivated manufactures to make their wineglasses as thin as possible—perfect for music making!

Sets of wineglasses tuned with water on which you play melodies—called the "musical glasses"—were common by about 1750 or so. Two claimants for credit for inventing them are Richard Pockrich and Christoph Gluck. Ann Ford published a 'method' for playing the musical glasses in 1761.

Benjamin Franklin heard a performance on a set of musical glasses in Cambridge by Edmund Delaval—probably in 1761—and decided to invent a more 'convenient arrangement'. He initially named his invention the 'glassy-chord', but changed it in early 1762 to the 'armonica' (after the Italian word for 'harmony'). His invention incorporated several insights:

Eliminate the pesky water tuning by making the glasses the right size in the first place for the pitches you want.
You'll now have a set of glasses graduated in size from largest for the lowest note to smallest for the highest note. Nest them inside of each other so only the rims are exposed, and you'll be able to play 10 glasses at once if you wish.
Mount this assembly of nested glasses on a spindle so it's already rotating.

He built one and it had its debut performance by Marianne Davies in early 1762. Franklin's invention was a hit. Marianne Davies went on to tour throughout Europe with it. A particularly brilliant virtuoso on the instrument—Marianne Kirchgaessner in Germany—inspired Mozart to compose music for it in 1791. Beethoven and a long list of other composers of the day also composed for it.

Two particularly 'creative' uses of the must be mentioned: Franz Mesmer used his to 'mesmerize' his patients, and E.T. Robertson used the around 1800 to accompany his Phantasmagoria shows— ghost-shows using 'Magic Lanterns' (early slide-projectors) to project spooky images on hidden screens and even smoke!

Although the was enthusiastically received throughout Europe, it found its true home in Germany—for some reason it excited the Germanic imagination to a degree that was unequaled anywhere else in Europe. Of course one can understand how enthusiasm for it might wane in England after the American Revolution—the was invented by that 'arch-traitor Benjamin Franklin'! And France was a little busy with the French Revolution.

But even in Germany interest in the instrument began to wane around 1820 or so. There were rumors about 'nerve damage' and such. But more common were complaints about simply not being able to hear it. Music was moving out of the relatively small aristocratic halls of Mozart's day into the big public concert halls of the 19th century, and without amplification the simply wasn't loud enough for their concert halls. The harpsichord disappeared at about the same time—perhaps for the same reason.

History of the (Short Version)

History of the
(Short Version)