#pyrophone

The Pyrophone, also known as the "fire organ" or "fire-explosion organ," is indeed a real instrument from the 19th century. It was invented by Georges Frédéric Eugène Kastner, a French physicist and musician, in the mid-1800s. The Pyrophone produces sound by using flames within glass tubes or metal pipes. The heat from the flames causes the air inside the tubes to vibrate, creating musical notes. The intensity and frequency of the sound can be altered by adjusting the size and intensity of the flames.

It makes noise with explosions it is very neat

It's just a fact that if something can make varied pitches of sound, of course you can make music with it! Sometimes even that's not required (looking at you, vuvuzelas). So how about fire?

Some time around 1870, a musician-physicist by the name of Georges Kastner found that an explosive gaseous mixture, when detonated inside of a glass tube, could produce controllable musical notes.

This invention was given the name of 'pyrophone'. If that's not cool enough for you, you could also call it the 'explosion organ'. Kastner worked with hydrogen gas in his pyrophone. Pressing a key would release a small amount of hydrogen and then ignite it.

The trick is that the gas is emitted in several streams. When they're separated into several small flames, they resonate at the same frequency as the glass tube in which they're encased, creating audible sound.

He then figured out how to get the lengths of the notes played just right. The note played could be cut short by joining the gas streams together again so they no longer resonate with the tube. You still don't get much staccato with that because it's an inherently slow process.

Kastner wasn't the first to figure out that fire could create music like this, but he was the first to assemble it into a working organ! Over 100 years earlier Byron Higgins found the phenomenon, and Michael Faraday and John Tyndall played around with it too.

You, too, can play a pyrophone today. Well, if you built it. I wouldn't expect them to show up at the local musical supply store any time soon. The bad news is that I've looked up some videos of them in use and wow that sound is underwhelming.

Well, Popular Science in 1875 really did expect this to take off. They proposed a pyrophone being played remotely by electrical signal, so the instrument may appear to be playing by itself in the fanciest of parties.

They go on to describe the pyrophone's sound as resembling "the sound of a human voice, and the sound of the Æolian harp; at the same time sweet, powerful, full of taste, and brilliant; with much roundness, accuracy, and fullness."

That is not what I got out of it.

It's basically the same noise you get blowing on a bottle with some water in it. Actually, it might be the same principle too. So yeah, I'm really glad this post is just text and images because I was not wowed by the sound of a pyrophone.

You really want to hear it? Okay, here you go.

Since when has there been an organ that uses fire to make sounds?? Apparently, there are a lot of instruments that use fire to create different pitches. Here's a video explaining how it works.

I have a feeling that Fintan created this idea... Tolkien's book series wasn't enough mischief for him, he needed an entire instrument that runs off flames. Imagine him playing this to make his noxflares grow because someone told him that plants like to grow when there is music playing, or something like that.