But apparently his âsinkerâ made quite an impression on Warden. Like many other guys trying to hang on to a big league job, Ribant was clever in finding a way to get hitters out, conventional or otherwise. His âsinkerâ turned out to beâ¦the âspitballâ. Now the idea behind a âspitterâ is not some wet, gooey mess, but rather to create a âheavyâ spot on the baseball, thereby causing it to have greater wind resistance and sink dramatically when it gets to within a few feet of home plate.
When Benjamin Franklin invented his mechanical version of the instrument in 1761, he called it the armonica, based on the Italian word armonia, which means harmony. The unrelated free-reed wind instrument aeolina, today called the  harmonica , was not invented until 1821, sixty years later.
Anne Vallayer-Coster, Attributes of Music, 1770. This still life painting depicts a variety of French Baroque musical instruments, such as a natural horn, transverse flute, musette, pardessus de viole, and lute. A musical instrument is an instrument created or adapted to make musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can be considered a musical instrumentâit is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument.