L'estro armonico National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. The 1797 Encyclopædia Britannica records that the fifth concerto was also played on an Irish variant of Benjamin Franklin's celebrated invention, the glass harmonica. Under the entry for "Harmonica" or "Armonica", a 35-glass harmonica is described, about which its inventor, the Dublin physician Edward Cullen, writes: There were numerous arrangements for keyboard instruments in the eighteenth century, as described in the next section. One surviving eighteenth century transcription of Op.3, No.3 has been interpreted as an arrangement for glockenspiel. Themes from movements in the concertos were borrowed by other composers for vocal works: the
Glass harmonica the rim of a wine goblet to produce tones is documented back to Renaissance times; Galileo considered the phenomenon (in his "Two New Sciences"), as did Athanasius Kircher. The Irish musician Richard Pockrich is typically credited as the first to play an instrument composed of glass vessels (glass harp) by rubbing his fingers around the rims. Beginning in the 1740s, he performed in London on a set of upright goblets filled with varying amounts of water. His career was cut short by a fire in his room, which killed him and destroyed his apparatus. Edward Delaval, a friend of Benjamin