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,
Glass harmonica fingers dipped in water" ("hydro-" for "water", "daktul-" for "finger", "psych-" for "soul"). The "Oxford Companion to Music" mentions that this word is "the longest section of the Greek language ever attached to any musical instrument, for a reader of "The Times" wrote to that paper in 1932 to say that in his youth he heard a performance of the instrument where it was called a "hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica"." The Museum of Music in Paris displays a hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica. Because its sounding portion is made of glass, the glass harmonica is a type of crystallophone. The phenomenon of rubbing a wet finger around