ABSTRACT
During my wanderings through the history of physics and music, I am constantly delighted when I stumble across interesting cross-connections. Right at the end of the Age of Enlightenment, in the very year of his death, Mozart wrote a charming little piece for a strange collection of instruments. It was an Adagio (K.617) for ute, oboe, and an instrument with a haunting, ethereal tone, which had only recently become fashionable for (alas) too short a time-a glass harmonica. It is played by stroking the rims of a set of glasses, just as you yourself must have done many times at the dinner table; and it had been invented some twenty years earlier by the American patriot, ambassador, political theorist, scientist and notorious womanizer, Benjamin Franklin. And he is important to our story because he was one of the earliest experimenters in the eld of study just then opening up-electricity.
