Origin: 1762
In the eighteenth century, Ben Franklin was America's one-man band, and his instrument was the armonica. It was his own invention, an improvement on the water-filled musical glasses he had heard during a visit to London. "Being charmed with the sweetness of its tone, and the music...produced from it, I wished only to see the glasses disposed in a more convenient form, and brought together in a narrower compass, so as to admit of a greater number of tones," Franklin explained. He turned the glasses into shallow hemispheres and nested them on a horizontal wooden rod that could be rotated with a pedal. The glasses were thus precisely tuned and close together, enabling virtuoso performances.
Franklin's explanation was in a letter of July 13, 1762, to Giambatista Beccaria, professor of physics at Turin, Italy. "In honour of your musical language," he wrote, "I have borrowed from it the name of this instrument, calling it the Armonica."
No, not the harmonica, although the laugh would be on him within a few years when people would insist on beginning it with a ha. But armonica or harmonica, Franklin's instrument enjoyed success well into the nineteenth century. A twentieth-century musician described it as having "the effect of coming from nowhere and the slow dying away into silence, which is a quite magical effect." The armonica was popular enough in Europe to attract the attention of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who composed an Adagio and Rondo for armonica, flute, oboe, viola, and cello, K. 617. Franklin himself played the armonica and had one in his home.
The armonica has no connection with what we call a harmonica today. Invented by an Austrian, the Mundharmonik was introduced to America by Matthias Hohner during the time of the Civil War. This harmonica is constructed of reeds with individual holes through which a player blows or draws in air to set the reeds vibrating. The armonica was a large box on a stand; the modern harmonica is usually small enough to fit into a pocket.
