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,
Crystallophone his glass harmonica in 1763 after attending a recital performed on musical glasses in London in 1761. Crystallophone A crystallophone is a musical instrument that produces sound from glass. One of the best known crystallophones is the glass harmonica, a set of rotating glass bowls which produce eerie, clear tones when rubbed with a wet finger. Musical glasses, the glass harp, where documented in Persia in the 14th century. The "ethereal" quality of instruments such as the glass harmonica exemplified the "Empfindsamkeit" and for a while, "the instrument was extraordinarily popular...[but] About 1830 the instrument fell into oblivion." The glasschord