Glass harmonica Franklin and a fellow of the Royal Society, extended the experiments of Pockrich, contriving a set of glasses better tuned and easier to play. During the same decade, Christoph Willibald Gluck also attracted attention playing a similar instrument in England. Benjamin Franklin invented a radically new arrangement of the glasses in 1761 after seeing water-filled wine glasses played by Edmund Delaval at Cambridge in England in May 1761. Franklin worked with London glassblower Charles James to build one, and it had its world premiere in early 1762, played by Marianne Davies. Writing to his friend Giambatista Beccaria in Turin, Italy,
18th-century French literature the originality and importance of their ideas and for their literary talent; writers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Diderot and Beaumarchais, whose ideas are still quoted today. They used their novels and plays as weapons which profoundly changed their society, while expressing their own personalities and feelings. Thanks largely to these writers, in the 18th century French became the language of culture, political and social reform all across Europe, and as far away as America and Russia. 18th-century French literature 18th-century French literature is French literature written between 1715, the year of the death of King Louis XIV of France,