The Musical Glasses and Glass Harmonica

In this paper my chief concern is with the place of the musical glasses and glass harmonica in musical and social history, and only incidentally with their technical development. I want to trace some little-known phases in their origins and use, and to try to build up a picture of their continuity in one form or another. The only work in English on the subject is C. F. Pohl's Cursory Notices on the Origin and History of the Glass Harmonica, written for the London Exhibition of 1862. This admirable pamphlet of sixteen pages is now very rare, and so I make no apology for repeating some of its contents. But as it deals almost entirely with Germany, apart from Benjamin Franklin, and does not go back beyond 1677, I shall take the subject farther afield in both time and place.