"Jonathan Davis, from Korn, he bought one," Hession says. "Mark Mothersbaugh, the guy from Devo."
"Neil Young," Coffey prompts from the back of the shop.
"Yeah, Neil Young has one," Hession says.
They're not talking about medical instruments, but about one of the shop's other products, the glass harmonica. For 25 years, Waltham-based G. Finkenbeiner Inc. has been the leading manufacturer of the instrument, once a fashionable ornament of parlor and concert hall. The lanky, laconic Hession, the firm's head glass blower, proudly continues the tradition started by founder Gerhard Finkenbeiner, but is amused by the outsize ratio of publicity to production, compared with the shop's volume of scientific glass blowing.
"The harmonica has always been really a sidelight," Hession says, "but wherever I go in the country, there's always someone who knows we make them."
In 1761, Benjamin Franklin, visiting Europe, heard one Edward Delaval perform on the musical glasses -- 50 crystal wine glasses, mounted in a cabinet, tuned by being filled with varying amounts of water, and played by running a moistened finger around the rims, producing an icy, distant falsetto. (The British poet Thomas Gray had also heard Delaval, remarking, "I thought it was a cherubim in a box.")
Franklin improved the instrument, horizontally mounting a set of permanently-tuned glass cups -- the smaller the cup, the higher the pitch -- on an axle that revolved via a foot pedal. Instead of navigating a jungle of stemware, the player merely touched the compactly nested spinning edges. Franklin's "armonica" became a runaway success. Mozart composed for it. Virtuosos toured with it.
The instrument was so popular that when the more familiar mouth organ was invented in the early 1800s, manufacturers conveniently appropriated the name, which had picked up an "h" along the way.
Finkenbeiner first saw a glass harmonica in a Paris museum in 1960. As a teenager in Germany, recruited into the Third Reich's flying bomb factory, he had studied electronics and apprenticed with a master glass blower; after the war, he worked for the French Navy. An enthusiastic pianist and organist, Finkenbeiner pursued musical inventions on the side; a request from a priest friend prompted his creation of a two-foot-long glass bell, a thin quartz rod encased in a vacuum tube. Struck by a tiny hammer and amplified 10,000 times, the sound uncannily imitates a heavy church bell.
In the 1960s, Finkenbeiner moved to the United States and opened his shop in Waltham, producing custom glass for laboratories and electronics manufacturers -- and glass bells. Inspired by the discarded ends of quartz furnace tubes used in making semiconductors, Finkenbeiner finally designed and built his first glass harmonica in the early 1980s, and set about singlehandedly creating a market for them.source:
http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles /2007/08/26/ for_pure_sound_a_clear_choice/
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