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Joey Weiss: Upstairs is where we have our classical instruments room.
Dylan Thuras: Oh, I see. I see. Okay. What’s downstairs then? That’s like your synths?
Joey: Downstairs is our 1950s room.
Dylan: I see. Cool.
This is Joey Weiss. All right. So Joey is, he’s my friend. He’s also my neighbor. He lives like five minutes up the road. He’s a really talented musician. He’s a really talented producer of music. And because of that, Joey has a studio next to his house. This incredible little space with a collection of a ton of instruments in it.
All right, so, into the attic of the studio. Cool. We got harps and all kinds of … Can you play any of these? That sounds nice. That sets a mood. That sets a mood.
And the reason I wanted to go visit Joey at the studio is to see one of these instruments in particular. This instrument seemingly made out of a series of glass salad bowls.
Describe what we’re seeing here. What am I looking at?
Joey: You’re looking at a two-and-a-half octave glass armonica. Glass armonica is a series of glass bowls basically turned on their side.
Dylan: They’re like, nested.
Joey: And they’re nested, right. And they’re connected through a rod. In a grotesque way, it kind of looks like a …
Dylan: Like a kebab!
Joey: A kebab on its side.
Dylan: It looks like a glass kebab!
Joey: Because as you would shave it from the middle, it gets …
Dylan: Oh my God, it looks exactly like a doner kebab.
Joey: Do you want to give it a go?
Dylan: Sure. Sure.
Here’s where I should probably warn you that the thing about this instrument is that since it was invented, it has been followed by a lot of rumors, including that if you hear the sound of the instrument, you might lose your mind. So, if you want to turn off the podcast now and not take the chance, this is the moment to do it.
I’m Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. And today, that includes my neighbor’s music studio, because we’re going to go deep on the history of the glass armonica. It’s a musical instrument that was invented by a founding father, became a hit sensation in Europe, and then became associated with a kind of magical, mystical, medical quackery. And did I mention that one of the people most associated with it also mysteriously disappeared?
This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Dylan: And what are you doing here? You’re dipping your fingers in water?
Joey: Distilled water, water with as little minerals as possible, because what you need to do is … Benjamin Franklin apparently was enamored with the sound of people playing wineglasses. He set about making a version of it that didn’t require a giant table and a ton of wineglasses, and you could put it in a suitcase and travel with it.
Dylan: Yes. We have Benjamin Franklin to thank for the glass armonica. That, I don’t know, that dude, what the hell? He’s done so many different things. Anyway, like Joey was saying, Ben Franklin spent some time—before the American Revolution—just kind of bumming around London. He was a colonial ambassador there, or equivalent. And at some point in the early 1760s, one of his friends in the Royal Society, a guy named Edmund Delaval, showed him a fun party trick. Edmund lined up a bunch of wineglasses, filled them with different amounts of water, and then he’d wet his finger and run them along the edge of the rim. You have probably seen somebody do this at a party, and if you do it right, they play. They make this kind of ringing, chiming sound, like a single-note musical instrument. But Ben Franklin was, like, really into this. He was like, “Oh, wait a second.”
Franklin was a famous tinkerer. He loved to invent all kinds of things. And so, in good Franklin style, he thinks, how can I invent a better version of this fun wineglass party trick? So, Franklin goes to a glassmaker in London, and he says, “Hey, I need you to create a series of nesting glass bowls in varying sizes, from small to medium-large, and all of them need to have a hole in the middle at the bottom.” And then, once they were made, the bowls could be nested together, and you’d put a rod going through them in this hole in the center. The rod would be made of cork or something like that, so it’d keep them stable and cushioned. And then you’d take this whole contraption, this series of nested bowls on a rod, and you’d put it into something that looked like a side table with a foot pedal, which could turn the rod, and thus, turn the bowls. And once Franklin had done all of this, the glass armonica was born.
For the rest of his life, Ben Franklin pretty much brought an armonica everywhere he went. I mean, you can picture Franklin showing up with his little bifocals—which he also invented—on his nose, and carrying his glass armonica over one hand, and then, you know, he’s like talking about his electricity research. Anyway, but little did Franklin know that this fun party invention of his was about to kick off a craze in Europe, a craze which would end in something of a moral panic and a public health scare. The sweet tones were about to turn sour.
Joey: You know, Mozart composed for the glass armonica.
Dylan: Really?
Joey: Yeah, which is fascinating, because for some reason in my brain, Mozart and Franklin do not cross over, but they do.
Dylan: The armonica took off in Europe right away, and like Joey said, Mozart was a big fan. He composed some pieces for it, and supposedly, Marie Antoinette even received armonica lessons. And it was the guy who introduced the armonica to Mozart that we need to spend some time talking about, because he is about to become central to this story.
Now, he’s not as famous as Franklin or Mozart, but you may have heard his name before. He was a German doctor named Franz Mesmer. Mesmer was an interesting guy. Playing the armonica was kind of a side hobby for him, but his main job was health remedies. I am putting “health remedies” in pretty heavy air quotes here.
Mesmer was really, really interested in magnets. He was a new age guru of that period. He believed the human body was filled with mysterious liquids, or these magnetic fluids. And these magnetic fluids could become blocked. And if they were blocked, they would cause health problems. So to cure this, Mesmer would hold magnets up over his patients and help move these fluids along. This theory became known as animal magnetism. And over time, Mesmer’s treatments got weirder and weirder and more and more theatrical. And a big part of these treatments became the sound of the armonica itself.
Joey: It’s haunting. There’s a sound that happens with the vibrating glass that’s unique. And after about five to 10 minutes of playing, it starts to charge the room in a way where the sound starts to feel as if it’s coming from no source at all.
Dylan: Imagine for a second that we are in some grand salon in Paris in the 1780s. Yes, please. There is a ton of people milling around. They’re all dressed up. The lights are low, the candles are burning, and mirrors are everywhere. There is a giant bathtub in the middle of this room, and the bathtub is filled with bits of iron and glass. And sticking out of this bathtub are these iron rods. Someone in the corner is sitting, playing the glass armonica.
I mean, just a side note, whatever you think of the effectiveness of these treatments, I mean, hell yeah. A+ theatrical presentation. Anyway, Franz Mesmer is in the middle of all this. He’s encouraging people with their stomach aches or headaches to come forward, come, come up, rub your body on these iron rods sticking out of this bathtub.
So for hours, people come up, and they’re rubbing their stomachs, their arms, their other areas on these rods. The armonica player is going hard. And this sensation would cause them to have these strong reactions. They would hiccup or sob or cry or even faint, all with the sound of that devilish glass armonica in the background.
This became enough of a craze that by the late 1780s, the other doctors in Paris were like, “What the—what are you doing?” It got intense enough that the King of France was asked to intervene. And he decided to put together basically a scientific commission to evaluate Mesmer’s claims. For this commission, the King brought together a chemist, a doctor, and he’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere: our old friend, Benjamin Franklin. At this point, he is living in Paris and working there as an ambassador.
So yes, Ben Franklin goes, and he sits into these sessions, and he’s like, “What is my armonica being used for? What is all of this going on?” So the commission declares Mesmer a fraud. Or put another way, these patients had sort of cured themselves using the power of the placebo effect, the imagination, the power of your own belief about yourself.
Mesmer eventually left Paris in a little bit of a cloud of shame. And while Mesmer may not have won his battle with Ben Franklin, he lives on in another way. Even if you have never heard anything about the glass armonica or bathtubs full of iron shavings before, you might still describe the feeling that you get when you’re listening to a glass armonica as mesmerizing. As in Franz Mesmer.
Maybe because of its association with mesmer and mesmerism, the tides began to turn against the armonica. Instead of curing you, rumors began to swirl that the armonica, even just listening to it, could actually make you ill. One popular musical journal warned in 1798 that the armonica could plunge a player into a nagging depression, and hence into a dark and melancholy mood, and that it was an apt method for slow annihilation. An apt method for slow annihilation is a great, like, album title. It went on to say that you should not play the armonica late at night, if you were ill, or had any kind of nervous disorder.
By the 1820s, the armonica had also just fallen out of fashion. It still popped up occasionally in classical music. This is a piece you might recognize. It’s by the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns. It’s from his Animal Suite, and this part is called, “Aquarium.” Really does feel like watching a jellyfish float by. What this meant is that the armonicas being out of fashion, slightly disreputable, and also highly, highly breakable, they just slowly started to disappear. They became collectibles, sitting in museums, and basically no one played them or thought much about them.
Until the 1980s. Because in the 1980s, a guy named Gerhard Finkenbeiner started making new glass armonicas. Gerhard was based in the Boston area, and he was a high-end glassblower. He made scientific glassware and tools for all the labs in the Boston area. This was super fancy stuff. This was glass for IBM, Raytheon, the glass used in making semiconductors.
One day, he was making quartz tools for semiconductors, and he saw that the cut-off ends of these tubes could make perfect glass armonica bowls. And so Gerhard started to manufacture brand new glass armonicas. And over time, people started collecting and playing these again. They became a kind of niche sort of thing to have if you were into music. And this is how Joey got his hands on one. It was passed through a series of collectors, including a guy in LA who had been using it to do movie soundtracks. However, Gerhard’s story takes a surprising turn.
So what happened to Gerhard?
Joey: So no one really knows what happened to Gerhard. Apparently he was an amateur pilot, and one day, he told his co-workers during lunch that he felt like he needed to go, didn’t mention anything about flying, apparently changed his mind after being home, and he got into his plane, and instead of going north towards his other home in New Hampshire, in his other glassblowing studio, he went south, and then was never heard from again.
Dylan: Gerhard Finkenbeiner disappeared on May 6, 1999. Neither him nor his plane have ever been found. What this means for glass armonicas is that today, they’re pretty hard to come by. Maybe if you’re handy with woodworking and glassblowing, or happen to have a collection of quartz salad bowls, you could potentially make one yourself. Ben Franklin refused to patent any of his inventions, including the glass armonica, and so made no money off of it. So if you wanted to try and make your own, you absolutely should, and Gerhard’s studio does still help fix existing glass armonicas, and I think they may produce even a couple. I think it is long past time for yet another comeback of the glass armonica.
In case you do not have a neighbor who happens to have a glass armonica in their attic, you can go see one in person at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Their armonica is an original that was owned by Franklin himself, and was given to the museum by one of his descendants. They are such cool instruments. They won’t let you play that one, though, unfortunately.
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This episode was produced by Amanda McGowan, and this episode was sound designed by Manolo Morales. Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Stitcher Studios. The people who make our show include Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Baudelaire, Gabby Gladney, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holdford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tyndall.