Glass harmonica the result would be musical cacophony. This modification also made it much harder to make the glass "speak", and muffled the sound. In 1975, an original armonica was acquired by the Bakken Museum in Minneapolis and put on display, albeit without its original glass bowls (they were destroyed during shipment). It was purchased through a musical instrument dealer in France, from the descendants of Mme. Brillon de Jouy, a neighbor of Benjamin Franklin's from 1777 to 1785, when he lived in the Paris suburb of Passy. Some 18th- and 19th-century specimens of the armonica have survived into the 21st century.
Glass harmonica from their instruments would likely have been dwarfed by lead from other sources, such as the lead-content paint used to mark visual identification of the bowls to the players. Historical replicas by Eisch use so-called "White Crystal" developed in the 18th c. replacing the lead with a higher potash content; many modern newly invented devices, such as those made by Finkenbeiner, are made from so-called Quartz "pure silica glass" - a glass formulation developed in the early 20th c. for scientific purposes. The somewhat disorienting quality of the ethereal sound is due in part to the way that humans perceive