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 in literature Human Reason: Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan". This was the first English translation directly from the Arabic original. Samuel Johnson was born on 18 September 1709 in Lichfield, Staffordshire, England. Horace Walpole was born on 24 September 1717. Daniel Defoe was another political pamphleteer turned novelist like Jonathan Swift and was publishing in the early 18th century. In 1719, he published "Robinson Crusoe". Alexander Smith was a biographer who authored "A Complete History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen" (1719) which includes heavily fictionalised accounts of English criminals from the medieval period to