Part 3.  The Secret Sound of Water.

Last installment we introduced you to the Barber Ktesilbios, and his discovery on the force of and sounds of air, today we introduce you to his most famous invention the Hydraulis.

Having found success with an initial musical invention..

“.. he succeeded in making a machine consisting of a hollow vase inverted, with an opening on the top, to which was attached a trumpet, and, on water being pumped into the vase the air was driven forcibly through the trumpet, producing a very powerful sound; and the machine caused so much admiration that it was consecrated in the temple of Venus.”
Charles Francis Abdy Williams The Story of the Organ, 1903

..Ktesilbios ended up developing the Hydraulis which literally meant water driven pipe instrument. This was not only the worlds first keyboard instrument, and the direct predessesor of the modern church organ, but the keys were also balanced in such a way that the amount of sound was controlled by how hard one pressed on them!

In it’s most basic description, when a key was depressed it would, through the use of levers, open and shut the mouths of the pipes.

The player would use a set of bellows, but in order to keep the pressure constant as the bellows were released the air pressure fell causing water that was trapped in a chamber (that resembled an upside down funnel) to rise. This created an equal amount of air pressure as the bellows and thus a constant pressure.

Although Ktesilbios died a poor man, his invention became immensely popular, was used in public entertainments in Byzantanium and Ancient Rome. The Mad Roman Emperor Nero was known to play the Hydraulis but funnily enough not his horse.

It became popular again in the 8^th and 9^th centuries when Arabs on discovering Ancient Greek treatises started building and exporting them to Europe, this lead to the evolution of the Modern Pipe Organ.

But it is not just the invention of the Hydraulis that makes Ktesilbios the ideal first star of our Journey through history.

His inventions also had a profound effect on music at the time, it changed peoples minds about how music can be created and thus in turn changed how people started to think about what music was..

“…The writings speak of water-blown pipes, which were used to simulate the singing of birds and the sound of a trumpet blown by a statue of Memnon in Thebes. This statue has been called one of the world’s wonders. When the sun shone upon the statue from a certain angle (particular time of day), an awe-inspiring sound was emitted, according to Tacitus, Pausanius and other writers. They compared the sound, produced by two organ pipes, to the sound of the bursting strings of a lyre or harp. The sun’s rays fell onto a sealed tank, which was partially filled with water. When the water was heated and had expanded sufficiently, it was forced through a siphon into a second tank. The air, which was displaced from the second tank, blew the two pipes. During the cooler night, a vacuum was created in the first tank causing water to be drawn in from a reservoir thus making the instrument ready for the next day. The tank was shielded from the sun so that the sun’s energy would warm it only at a very specific time of day. In another Greek example, a pipe or whistle was blown to imitate the chirping of a bird. An artificial bird was placed on top of an artificial tree on top of a mechanism similar to the one described above. The warbling of the bird was imitated by the inversion of the sounding pipe into a tank filled with water. This instrument was not solar-powered, and had to be activated by turning on a tap. It could only play until all of the water had flowed from the first tank into the second one. Aristokles (second-century BC) speaks of an instrument he calls the organon referring to a water organ, which made figures play wind, string and percussion instruments.”

Joseph R. Curtis, The Water Organ and Other Related Sound-Producing Automata

What an Ingeniously simple invention – but what inspiration – one that they fittingly attributed to the music of the gods!

That’s the end of part 3.

In our next part we’re going to meet the greatest inventor of antiquity

Click here for part 4.

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