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TechStuff Tidbits: Ben Franklin and the Glass Armonica

Published Feb 1, 2023, 6:35 PM

Only Benjamin Franklin would listen to a musician playing wine glasses and think "I bet I could use technology to make this easier." And he did by inventing the Glass Armonica, an instrument that gained a peculiar reputation for producing ethereal music and . . . health problems?

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio, and how the tech are you? It's time for a tech Stuff Tidbits episode. This was a little different from the ones I typically do, and it's because, uh, well, it's because of a few things. First of all, among all my other geek equalities, I am a musical theater fan, and like a lot of musical theater folks and even people outside of musical theater fandom, I absolutely was captivated by Lynn Manuel Miranda's Hamilton's when that debuted several years ago now, and one thing that delighted me was discovering that he had written some songs that didn't make it into the show, and one of those songs was about one of America's iconic founding father as a man who was never president but was a very important ambassador and an inventor and uh kind of a smart alec, Benjamin Franklin. And he wrote a song for Benjamin Franklin, who was originally going to appear in Hamilton's, but ultimately it just didn't really make sense for the scope of the show, so it got cut, but he handed the lyrics over to the band, the Decembrists. Apparently he said that he had always thought of it as having a sort of sound like the Decembrists other music. So the Decembrists composed music to go along with these lyrics. They padded it out a little bit and you get Ben Franklin's song Word of Warning. That song, while hilarious, also has a lot of coarse language in it. It is not family friendly, I will say that, but it's very, very entertaining, and in part of it long story short, too late, there's a reference to the hardened glass armonica or harmonica, both words have been used to describe it. And that made me want to do an episode about this particular invention, because not only was it a really cool invention, a really neat idea to create an entirely new musical instrument based off of older techniques, but also because this instrument has a very strange reputation as a reputation for causing distress, though it's entirely possible this reputation was invented rather than earned, sort of like how reports of chaos in the wake of the War of the World's Radio Broadcast seem to have been more exaggerated not you know, if not entirely invented out of whole cloth. If you've ever looked into the supposed panic caused by the War of the World's Radio Broadcast, you find out there wasn't so much panic as there was a lot of media reports about alleged panic. Well, it seems like that may have also been the case with the the panic around the glass armonica. But we'll get there, and I'll also call out another podcast which did a full episode about that and it is really really good. So first let's talk about what the hardened glass harmonica or armonica was really based off of and what it does and how it all comes down to glass harps. So that's another name for an instrument that uses a series of glasses, like like drinking glasses. Sometimes they're made out of crystal wine glasses are pretty common. The player of this instrument runs a wet finger around the rim of a glass or sometimes multiple glasses, and this produces an ethereal note at least if you do it correctly, the glass sings, it vibrates and rings out. So using different sizes of glasses, or by adding or removing some liquid to a glass or several glasses. It allows you to make different notes to produce different pitches. If you add more water to a glass, that actually produces a lower pitch. I'll explain why in just a second. So, with a collection of these glasses that are each tuned just right to represent specific notes on the musical scale, a skilled player can actually play a tune on glasses running their fingers around it. I'm sure you've seen this, or maybe you've seen videos of it. Maybe you've done it yourself. It's not difficult to do. You can actually just do this with your typical glass. It has to be glass typically, because that's what you're gonna be able to get something to make a note that's that's audible. Now, to understand what's going on, we do have to go into some physics. And first up, we need to t about friction. Now, I'm sure all of you know what friction is already, but just to set a foundation, friction is the resistance you encounter when one surface moves across another surface. Obviously, that resistance depends upon the surfaces. Like if you were to take two pieces of silk and rub them against each other, you would find that they produce a lot less friction than if you took two pieces of rough grade sand paper and then rub the sandpaper parts against each other. You have a lot more friction in that second case. But when your finger makes contact with a glass, there's friction between your finger and the glass, which is a good thing, or else you would never be able to pick up that glass, and you would never be able to take a drink, and you'd be very, very thirsty. But the friction can be enough to make your fingertips stick against the glasses surface a little bit, so it's actually not that easy to move your finger smoothly along the rim of the glass. And for that reason, glass harp players will first wet their fingers. They'll dip their fingers in some liquid. Uh. I remember back when I was first learning about this, when I was a kid, it was always vinegar for some reason, but it could be other stuff. Wine is also pretty common, especially uh for things like someone doing this at a party. They would use wine glasses with wine in them filled to different levels and it would be called like singing wine. And uh. This introduces this liquid on your fingers introduces a layer of lubrication that allows the finger to slip against the glass more readily. And of course it is possible to make your fingers too slippery, because if there's two slippery, then they aren't producing enough vibration for you to have a note. So what you really need is the perfect balance so that your finger is creating enough but not too much friction as you're moving it around the rim in a circle. And when this happens, when you get that just right with the right pressure and the right amount of lubrication, the motion you are creating will cause vibrations to move through the glass and this ends up being the note that you hear. Now. I have talked a lot about sound in tons of previous episodes of Tech Stuff, but we'll go over it again really quickly. Sound, when you get down to it, is really vibration. Our perception of sound, hearing being the primary way for most people to perceive sound, involves sensing vibrations. So in hearing, this typically means that something has produced vibrations significant enough to cause air molecules around it to fluctuate, so you get little changes in air pressure. Air molecules are kind of pushing against each other and then pushing back. So the air molecules themselves are vibrating, and they vibrate outward from the source of the sound. If the vibrations are great enough, if they have enough amplitude, and we aren't too far away from the source, we can experience these fluctuations of air molecules. The changes in air pressure can affect our ear drums cause the ear drum to vibrate, and tiny bones in our inner ear connected to the ear drum also connect to the cochlea. Uh, it's a structure in our inner ear that contains an organ called the organ of corte or court. I. Now, I don't want to get two bogged down in all of this because it gets into a lot of physiology that I'm just not prepared to chat about. But essentially what's happening is little nerves in our ears pick up these vibrations and transform that into signals that our brain can interpret as the experience of sound. So when you try trace it all back to the source again, it's all about vibration. Now. The rate at which something vibrates is called a frequency, and we use a unit of measure for frequency called a hurts, and this tells us the number of times something has a full oscillation within a second. So an oscillation is you can think of it as going from the starting point to the end point and back to the starting point again, like if you're if you're making waves with a jump rope or something like that, it's one full wave length would be an oscillation. So if something vibrates only once a second, that would be one hurts. The range of typical human hearing is between twenty hurts or twenty oscillations or vibrations per second, which would be a very very low pitched sound, and it goes up to twenty thousand hurts or twenty killer hurts that would be a very very high pitch sound because whatever is vibrating is vibrating twenty thousand times per second. Also, as we get older, we typically start to lose hearing at certain pitches, so are arranged narrows. This is why you will hear stories about stores that will play sounds at much higher pitches that irritate young people because they still have the capability of hearing those those pitches. Well, old people like me remain completely unaware because we can't hear those those pitches anymore. Okay, that's the very basics of hearing from a very very very high level. When we come back from this break, I'm going to talk about resonant frequency and what that has to do with glass harmonicas. But first let's take this quick break. Okay, we're back. Now we're gonna talk about resonant frequency. So if you have a glass and you lightly tap it with say a spoon like think about you know, weddings and stuff where people would tap their glasses in order to signal that the groom and bride should kiss, or that the bride and bride or groom and groom should kiss. You know, it's any of those cases. So if you tap a glass, it produces a tone. That tone it has the resonant frequency of that glass. This is the natural frequency of the glasses vibration. Now, that depends on lots of stuff. It depends on the size and the thickness of the glass, and also whether or not anything's in the glass. Like I said earlier, if you put liquid in a glass, you start to lower the pitch of the tone it produces. That's because liquid actually inhibits vibration. It makes it it's more work to vibrate because you've got more matter that you have to push around. So the more matter that's in the glass, the lower the pitch is going to be because it's going to vibrate fewer times per second as a lee, so you get a lower pitch. All right. If you produce a sound that has the same frequency as the resonant frequency of a glass, then that actually induces vibrations in the glass as well. So in other words, if you were to tap a glass and it played out, say middle C, which would be a very low note for a glass, but whatever it produces middle C, then if you were to produce a middle C sound with enough amplitude enough volume, you would cause the glass to start vibrating at that resonant frequency, and you could potentially do it enough for the glass to deform to the point where it breaks. And you've probably seen or heard of demonstrations of this. The classic example is you have an opera singer producing just the right vocal note with just the right amount of of oomph, of amplitude of volume, and singing loudly and longly enough to cause a glass a shatter. It's a pretty common thing to see in like movies and TV. And obviously MythBusters did and a thing on it as well where they reproduced a tone and show that it is possible. It's not easy to do necessarily, but it is possible. Uh. And side note on that it is easy to get an object to vibrate and its resonant frequencies, which can also include harmonics. That gets super complicated. We're not going to dive into harmonics in this episode, but uh, it is uh, you know, harmonics is what it sounds like, right, So if you were to produce a harmonic frequency to a resonant frequency, you can also get something to vibrate. But it's very difficult to get something to vibrate at any frequency apart from its resonant frequency and harmonics. Okay, so let's get back to the glass heart. Rubbing your moistened finger along the rim of a glass can create just the right amount of friction to cause the glass to vibrate at its resonant frequency, which produces a note. And if you make a whole bunch of glasses and they're all of slightly different sizes and thickness, or you fill them with different amounts of liquid, you can produce lots of different notes, and if you tune these glasses so that they match frequencies of specific musical notes, you can play music. It does get a little complicated, and um, we should also mention that tuning things to specific musical notes it's not as straightforward as it sounds, partly because there are different definitions of what makes up a musical note, depending on whether you're a scientist or a musician. And what do I mean by that? Well, Joseph Savour, a French scientist of the eighteenth century, proposed that middle C the note middle C, which if you were to look at a piano keyboard and you start on the left side of the keyboard, middle C would be the fourth C note as you go to the right on the keyboard. Well, he said that middle c's frequency should be two hundred fifty six hurts. However, there's another standard called the Stuttguard pitch or the A four forty pitch, and that one marks middle C is having a frequency of two hundred sixty one point sixty three hurts. If you were to listen to these two tones right one after the other, it can be a little challenging to tell them apart, because while to fifty six and to sixty one point six are different, they're still really close. And the human ear is not great at picking up very subtle shifts for the typical person. I mean, there are extraordinary people out there who are able to detect such things easily. I am not one of them. So why did the scientific community say middle C should be two fifty six? Hurts? It's because tot is a power of two, which makes things easier when you're doing calculations. But musicians sort of aimed for this a four note at being four forty. Uh frequency and that internment that middle C had to be to sixty one point sixty three once you started to work outward from a four forty. So yeah, two different ways of tuning, and uh, it gets pretty subtle, but it does make a difference. Now, whatever pitch standard you're determined to follow, your job as an aspiring glass heart player is to pick out a selection of glasses that can produce a tone that's reasonably close to the various pitches of musical notes, and then you you designate them in some way so that you remember, all right, well, this is a this is B, this is C all the way up to G, and then all the incidentals or accidentals. You would need to have those arranged just right so that you could produce the tones that you want. And then you would play glasses in specific sequences and combinations to produce music. Really talented players can play multiple glasses all at the same time by spreading their fingers out really wide and making contact with the rims of multiple glasses and create things like chords, which is amazing, Like when I see someone who's really good at this, it is phenomenal. Well, earlier glass instruments actually involves striking glasses with like a little a little striking stick for example, like a little padded hammer. Um. There are written accounts that date to the late seventeenth century, so the late sixteen hundreds, in other words, that actually described playing glasses by dipping one's fingers in wine and then rubbing the rim of the glass. So we know that at least as early as the late sixteen hundreds people had started to play glass harps in this way. And now we're ready to talk about Benjamin Franklin and his contributions to this. So the story goes that Franklin was traveling Europe in the mid seventeen hundreds. He was acting as an ambassador for the United Eates and visiting uh places like England and France and attempting to, you know, advance the interests of the colonies at the time and and get them in a better position. Uh. And that he attended a concert at some point in this range of years during which a musician entertained the audience by playing the glass harp, and that got old Benny Boy to thinking. See, when you have your traditional glass harp, the musician has to definitely move between glasses. They constantly are keeping their hands in motion as they're rubbing the rims of glasses in this circular motion. But Ben thought, what if you could rotate the glasses and then you just press a wet finger to the rim and you can just hold your finger there. You don't have to move your finger around the glass. The glass is rotating, So that way you can produce this note, but you don't have to do this circular motion the whole time. Wouldn't that make it easier to play the glass harp? Well? Yeah, but how do you do that? So Franklin figured that if you could create a stack of tuned glass bowls, each tuned to a single note, and then separated from all the other bowls with some sort of dampener, like a cork type material, so that they're not making contact with each other, because if you did that then there would be issues with producing the right vibrations. You could create a stack of containers tuned from low to high or high to low. The largest bowl would produce the lowest note, the smallest bowl would produce the highest pitch note. So step one was just having glass bowls made that could produce approximations of specific musical notes, then finding a way to stack them while not having them actually make contact with each other, and then finding a way to rotate them so that you could rub your fingers against the rim of each of these balls and produced these notes. Then Franklin came up with this amazing idea of drilling a hole through the bottom of each bowl. Through those holes he inserted an iron rod. So now you had a stack of bowls. The original armonica had thirty seven of them, and they're on a stick. And then he turned the stick horizontal, and then he mounted it in a cabinet and connected the rod to a wheel that could rotate. So this is the rotational action that causes the whole rod and thus all the balls that are mounted on the rod to rotate. So you just put your finger against the rim of the bowl and it sings. So he connected that wheel to a foot pedal, a treadle similar to what you would find on an old treuttle powered sewing machine, and he used a belt to connect the two so by peddling with your foot you could provide the rotation chinal force needed to turn the wheel, which in turn was connected to this iron rod that had all these bowls mounted on it. So you would treadle, it would spin the bowls, and then you would move your fingers on the rims of these bowls to produce the music. That was composer William Zeitler playing the glass armonica. It was truly ingenious and it's drastically simplified playing the glass harp. I mean really it was a different instrument that was, as he called it, the harmonica or harmonica, and Franklin was known to give performances in Europe. He also produced some of these for musicians to play. He himself was an amateur musician, and according to what I read, people were delighted to attend one of his performances where he would play well known pieces and some compositions of his own on the armonica. But there were other musicians who became truly famous for playing this instrument. I imagine it was quite the challenge for him to tour around with this thing, because you have to pack it up in such a way to minimize the possibility of damage. You know, you have a lot of glass pieces in there. In fact, there are a lot of historical harmonicas that suffered damage during shipping incidents in the modern era where you had, say a museum receiving a glass armonica from some like some of Franklin's descendants, and then in the shipping some of the bowls got cracked and broken. So it was a really delicate instrument still is to this day. I mean, the armonica still is a thing, although you're more likely to encounter it in a museum than you are on the stage. Now we're gonna take a little break. When we come back, we're going to get to the weird stuff. Okay, we're back. So Franklin invinced this glass armonica and drastically changes how you can produce music by by creating these vibrations and glass with your fingertips. And his invention was a pretty big hit in Europe according to the Franklin Institute, and old Benny was just happy to donate his invention to the world. He didn't patent it. He didn't file a patent for this invention. He apparently thought that there was sort of a moral imperative to share your ideas with the world in order to contribute to the general improvement, and that trying to keep an idea to yourself or to maintain ownership of it was almost like an immoral or evil thing to do. Um keeping in mind that he also was enjoying a lot of support from his country, so he wasn't in a position where he was like starving or anything of the sort. So he was in a real position of privilege as well. We have to acknowledge that anyway. Composers, including really famous ones like Mozart and Beethoven, wrote pieces for the glass armonica, but the instrument was somewhat limited in scope. You could actually change the the amplitude or volume of the notes you played by adjusting how much pressure you were putting on the rims of the bowls as you played them, but only to a point. And if you were to combine the armonica with an orchestra of other instruments, it was very easy for the armonica's sound to get lost in the mix because there was a limited amount of volume you could produce. So it had limited utility, which meant that, you know, you could have these nice little pieces written for it almost distractions, but you couldn't easily incorporated into more um ambitious works of music. Another drawback of the harmonica is obviously it is a very physically delicate instrument, and when you make an instrument out of glass, he really takes some risks. They were expensive to make because you had to get the bowl sizes just right to produce the notes you needed, and so the instrument also had limited practicality just because they were difficult to keep in good working order and they were expensive to repair or replace. But the truly weird part of this instrument is that they got a reputation for given people the hebe gebs or worse, the sound produced could be perceived as unpleasant or unsettling to some kind of like how some people really the sound made when you rub your hand against the surface of a of a rubber balloon, or the horrible fingernails down the chalkboard sound like those just make people's skin crawl. Well, some people had a similar reaction to hearing the music produced by the armonica, and there are rose reports of people having unpleasant reactions or worse what during or shortly following an harmonica performance. One of the quotes I found while doing research on this, at least in most of the sources I came across, allegedly came from an eighteenth century writer, Dave J. C. Miller and says, quote, it is true that the armonica has strange effects on people. If you are irritated or disturbed by bad news, by friends, or even by a disappointing lady, abstain from playing it. It would only increase your disturbance. End quote. Now, the reason why I said came from allegedly came from a writer named J. C. Miller is that's the name that I found in a lot of different sources that all seemed to be pulling from the same roots source, and I could not find J. C. Miller. I kept looking at I kept trying to find the original source, and eventually I found out why I couldn't find J. C. Miller because at some point someone must have made a mistake with that person's name, and a lot of other people repeated that mistake, and thus J. C. Miller was born. But no, the actual person who did say that quote, although it was in German so it wasn't exactly the same as how I just recited it was a man named Johann Christian Mueller in his work and light zoom zeb stunt off their harmonica or method of self instruction for the harmonica. And yes, I know my German pronunciation is terrible. Look my English pronunciation is terrible. I'm from the South. Just give me a break. Anyway, Mueller was a composer. He was a musician who attended uh St Thomas School in Leipzig, which was a school that Johann Sebastian Bach taught at. Though there's no way of knowing whether or not Mueller actually studied directly under Bach or not, there are a lot of sites I saw that listed Mueller as a pupil of Bach, but also had to acknowledge that, you know, it's not like we have any record that he actually was taught directly by Bach, who was a true master of a composer. I don't have a whole lot more information about Mueller. I know that he was born in the early eighteenth century, but don't know when you died. I didn't find any record of that. And that apparently he played the harmonica and later wrote a book about how you could teach yourself how to play it. Also that he indicated that the music produced could make people feel an easy and irritable as if they had encountered a disappointing lady, which is a heck of a thing to say. And this reputation for the harmonica spread a little bit, and in fact, I think it's spread way more in the modern era than it did in the eighteenth century. Stories emerged about people reportedly suffering all sorts of negative health reactions after either listening to an armonica performance or actually playing the instrument themselves, and so the musical instrument began to be associated with this idea of of negative health impacts, and that the sound produced by the instrument, this ethereal singing sound, would cause these these health impacts somehow like that sound would somehow create these physiological reactions in certain people. So the glass armonica was blamed for pretty vague complaints, ranging from promoting irritability so it could like cause a a pair of spouses too uh to end up fighting with each other if they listened to an harmonica performance, for example, And it ranged all the way up to causing nervous disorders, usually poorly defined nervous disorders because people really didn't have an understanding of what the underlying issue was and they just kind of painted it with this overall vague term. But it all even included a an allegation that the harmonica was connected to the death of a child who attended a concert in Germany. Now I will add that I couldn't find any definitive source about this this death and the nature of it and what actually happened. I don't know if that happened at all. What I do know is there are a ton of different sources out there that mention it, but I couldn't find a primary source that actually talks about what really happened. Allegedly, a town in Germany even outlawed the harmonica because of its relationship with causing these sorts of negative health impacts. I will say that from what I could tell, it looked like this reputation was pretty much confined to a region within Germany. So maybe this was just a very localized superstition more than any sort of actual effect that was really produced by the armonica. There was also a hypothesis going around that perhaps ill effects on armonica players weren't because of the sound being produced. It wasn't that the notes were somehow disturbing the humors inside the human body, but rather that the bowls were made out of lead glass, kind of like the glass you would find and say stained glass windows. And it's true, lead it's of is toxic right if you consume lead. First of all, it accumulates in your body if you don't get rid of it, and so it can build up over time to becoming a toxic level, and you can get lead poisoning. But just touching lead glass is not likely to cause problems. If you were to drink from a lead glass, that could actually cause issues because lead could conceivably leach into whatever liquid you're drinking, especially if you have like some sort of acidic drink or hot drink in there. You might end up consuming some lead as you drink, so you should not use lead glass to make glassware out of And like I said, that lead will stick around in your body, so even if you're just getting a tiny bit of it each time, over the course of your life, it can get to a point where you can actually start to encounter symptoms of lead poisoning just because you've you've over time consumed enough of it to have that toxicity manifest But again, playing the class armonica with your fingers would not likely cause such problems. I mean, maybe there'd be a way of having lead accumulated on your fingertips, and if you're not washing your hands at all, then perhaps you could start consuming it, but it's it's a long shot. It's not like just playing the harmonica would make you sick from exposure to lead. Maybe if you ate your armonica that would be a different story. It would also be a hell of a story because those things were pretty darn big and you're eating glass. So not that that's unheard of, there are people who have done it. But yeah, that that's one way you could get lead poisoning, although you might have some other more acute issues to worry about before the lead poisoning sets in. I wanted to give a shout out for another podcast I mentioned that earlier, and that podcast is Sawbones, a marital tour of Misguided Medicine, hosted by Dr Sidney McElroy and her husband, Justin McElroy of the mcilroys, of my brother and my brother there in me. In fact, I almost forgot his name there for a second. I had to think, who's the oldest brothers? Justin and uh? And they do a podcast called Sawbones where they go into various medical related stories throughout history, usually to kind of unveil when we were just completely off track or sometimes when we accidentally found our way on the right pathway as we were learning more about medicine. They did a full episode about the Glass Armonica. I recommend listening to that one. It came out actually almost a year ago today. Came out in early February of two So definitely check that out if you want to hear more. They have a great show, and I think Dr Sydney is fantastic at explaining medical matters in a way that's really easy to understand. She does for medicine what I try to do for technology. So yeah, check that out. But I really want to talk about this because again, I was just listening to that Ben Franklin song and it popped into my head and I just thought, what a curious story, ranging from the the inventiveness of the musical instrument itself and the simplicity of its mechanism, I mean, a very simple belt driven rotational wheel that turns the stack of bowls so that you can play them, and then the very weird reputation it got later on. Plus it's connected to a founding father of the United States. I mean, it's just kind of like, so such a weird story that I felt that I wanted to to do a quick tech Stuff tinbits on it. Hope you enjoyed this. If you have suggestions for future topics I should cover on tech Stuff, please reach out to me. One way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W. Another way to do that is to download the I Heart Radio app. You can download it for free on Android or iOS, and once you have it downloaded, you just type in tech Stuff in the little search bar that'll take you to the text a page within the I Heart Radio app and you'll see there's a little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds and like, let me know what you would like to hear in future episodes and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yeah. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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