Benjamin Franklin’s Glass Harmonica
In the 1760s, Benjamin Franklin, one of America’s Founding Fathers and a renowned polymath, gave the world an exceptional musical device, the Glass Harmonica. His invention, also known as the Bowl Organ or the Hydrocystalophone, is not precisely a harmonica, but it still gives boundless music nevertheless.
Source: musiconmarket.org
The harmonious gadget made use of several bowls made of glass and arranged in sequence, producing music by giving tonal variations and notes by the bowl size. The Bowl Organ, considered by a vast majority as a ‘strange’ apparatus, is played by creating friction between the player’s fingers and the bowls as the device revolves around an axis.