RT Journal Article
T1 Something in the Air
A1 Melissa Dickson
YR 2017
VO 7
IS Spring 2017
K1 Ammoniaphone
K1  Evolutionary Biology
K1  Robert Carter Moffat
K1  Italian Vocal School
K1  Climate Theory
K1  Commodity Culture
K1  nineteenth century
K1  History of Medicine
K1  History of Technology
AB In January 1885, the Glaswegian Professor of Chemistry Dr Robert Carter Moffat organised a special operatic concert at St James’s Hall, London, to which he invited around two thousand scientists and musicians. The point of this invitation concert was that all the singers used bottled air. Moffat himself appeared between the various performances, wielding his mysterious Ammoniaphone, or bottled-air machine, a long silver tube which he flourished in the faces of his audience while describing its virtues with considerable animation. The premise of the Ammoniaphone was that since Italian opera singers were known throughout the world for the beauty of their voices, it stood to reason that this must have something to do with the quality of the air they breathed. The Ammoniaphone, Moffat claimed, contained the precise chemical formula of the air in Southern Italy, and inhaling from this instrument effectively resulted in the ‘Italianization of the voice’.Drawing on representations of the Ammoniaphone across nineteenth-century advertising and the medical and musical press, and situating these representations within the broader Victorian fascination with the supremacy of Italian opera singers, this essay offers new insight into the emergent corporeal anxieties betrayed by late nineteenth-century consumer culture, and the various methods by which the body might be continually fashioned and re-fashioned in order to produce a high-functioning social subject in a fast-paced modern society. Aggressively (not to say unscrupulously) advertised, the Ammoniaphone was marketed to vocalists, clergymen, public speakers, choirmasters, schoolmasters, parliamentarians, and enthusiastic amateurs of these vocations, with claims that it would conserve and preserve the voice, expand its range upwards and downwards, and lend it an otherwise unobtainable purity, beauty and richness. This, I will argue, was symptomatic of a broader cultural need to counter the stresses and strains of modern life, and to wreak some kind of evolutionary advantage through artificial intervention.
NO For more information on medical climatology in general and in the nineteenth century, see Jankovic, V, 2000, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press); Thomson, W A R , 1979, A Change of Air: Climate and Health (London: Adam and Charles Black); Turner, E S , 1967, Taking the Cure (London: Michael Joseph Ltd); and Wohl, A, 1983, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
NO Bowick’s essay was reproduced by Moffat in the small pamphlet cited above, which was circulated during performances and contained the history of the Ammoniaphone, explained its virtues and provided a range of testimonials.
NO For a detailed outline of Victorian debates regarding the origins of music, see Kivy, Peter, 2007 Music, Language and Cognition, and other essays in the Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press), and for an excellent study of the ways in which Victorian musical culture absorbed and responded to prevailing currents in evolutionary thought, see Zon, B, ‘The Non-Darwinian Revolution and the Great Chain of Musical Being’, in Lightman, B and Zon, B (eds), Evolution and Victorian Culture, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp 196–260.
NO For a more detailed study of the range of nerve tonics available in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, see Oppenheim, J, 1991, Shattered Nerves: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
NO The term ‘placebo’ had been used in medical circles since the late eighteenth century to refer to those prescribed substances or therapies thought to be medically ineffectual but nonetheless of psychological value for patients in giving them something to believe in, by which they might therefore be cured. The Oxford English Dictionary dates its first usage in this sense to Motherby’s New Medical Dictionary of 1785 and R Hooper’s Lexicon-Medicum in 1811. For a more detailed history of this term in the nineteenth century, see Pepper (1945) and also Shapiro (1959).
NO Moffat cited both these articles in his pamphlet as evidence of the medical world’s support of the Ammoniaphone, even though they were published before the Ammoniaphone was invented.
NO In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, authoritative teaching of the ‘old Italian method’ was given by Franceso Lamperti and his son Giovanni Battista, and outlined in detail in their books, The Art of Singing (1877) and The Technique of Bel Canto (1905) respectively.
PB The Science Museum Group
SN 2054-5770
LA eng
DO 10.15180/170702
UL http://journal.sciencemuseum.org.uk/browse/issue-07/something-in-the-air/
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WT Science Museum Group Journal
OL 30