Franklin on Music

In an open letter to Franklin, dated 20 May 1771, prefaced to a new edition of his book on electricity Dell’ elettricismo artificiale, e naturale (Of Natural and Artificial Electricity) (1772), Giambatista Beccaria, Professor of Experimental Physics at Turin, wrote of his correspondent: ‘to you it is given to enlighten human minds with the true principles of the electric science, to reassure them by your conductors against the terrors of thunder, and to sweeten their senses with a most touching and suave music’. Franklin is closely identified in this description with the age of Enlightenment: he is the experimental philosopher and contributor to electrical research, the inventor of the lightning conductor, and the improver of the bell-type instrument known as the musical glasses. The letter to which Beccaria is replying is one that Franklin had sent from London almost a decade earlier and had published in the fourth edition of his Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America (1751; 4th edn, 1769). Franklin, who participated in an extensive network of European investigators linked to one another by visits, publications and technological exchange, regrets in that letter that he has no new information on the subject of electricity to share with his correspondent, but offers instead ‘an account of the new instrument lately added here to the great number that charming science was before possessed of’. That ‘charming science’ is, of course, music, and the new instrument to which Franklin refers his adaptation of the musical glasses into the ‘Armonica’ so named, as he informs Beccaria, in honour of the musical language of Italy. In ‘entertaining’ his correspondent with a description of the armonica, sufficiently detailed to enable Beccaria and his friends to ‘imitate it […] without being at the expence and trouble of the many experiments [he] ha[s] made in endeavouring to bring it to its present perfection’, Franklin reveals the co-existence of science and music in the eighteenth century: electrical and musical experimentation are presented as alternative yet related activities.