Ernst Chladni

monoskop.org/Ernst_Chladni

Ernst Chladni, c1825.

Lithography by Ludwig Albert
von Montmorillon.

Born November 30, 1756

Wittenberg, Electorate of Saxony (today Germany)

Died April 4, 1827 (aged 70)

Breslau, Kingdom of Prussia (today Wrocław, Poland)

Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni was a physicist and musician. His

work includes research on vibrating plates and the calculation of the
speed of sound for different gases. For this some call him the "father
of acoustics". He also did pioneering work in the study of meteorites,
and therefore is regarded by some as the "father of meteoritics" as
well.

He was a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in St.

Petersburg (1794), Royal Society of Harlem in the Netherlands, Royal
Society of Natural Scientists in Berlin, Society of the Arts and Sciences
in Mainz, Academy of the Applied Arts in Erfurt, Philomatic Society of
Paris, Batavia Society in Rotterdam, and societies in Munich and
Göttingen.[12]

Life
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Ancestors

Chladni came from an educated

family of academics and learned men.
Chladni's great-grandfather, Georg
Chladni (Chladenius, 1637–92),
studied at gymnasium in Banská
Bystrica (Neusohl) and theology at a
university in the Protestant city of
Wittenberg. He served as head of a
protestant school in Špania Dolina
(Herrengrund) near Banská Bystrica
(1666), and from 1667 as a protestant
rector of a church in Kremnické Bane
(Johannesberg) 4 km away from
Kremnica (Kremnitz), a mining town in
the Kingdom of Hungary (today
central Slovakia). After shortly living in Martin Chladni
Görlitz​, Upper Lusatia, he returned to
Kremnica. But after criticising Jesuits and Catholic church from his
position of a Lutheran theologian, during the Counter Reformation he
had to flee the town (on 19 October 1673), along with his wife and 4-
year old son, Martin. From 1680 he worked as a rector of a church in
Hanswald where he died.[1][2]

Chladni's grandfather, Martin Chladni (Chladen, Chladenius,

Chladenio, 25.10.1669–12.9.1725, born in Kremnica [13]), was also a
Lutheran theologian. He studied philosophy and theology in
Wittenberg (1688), and received litentiate in theology in 1704. He
served in Dresden, Ubigau (1695), Jassen; in 1710 became professor of
theology at the University of Wittenberg; in 1719 provost; and in
1720–21 was dean of the faculty of theology and later rector of the
university. He authored around 70 religious scripts and dissertations,
in Latin and German. He had one son, Ernst. Died in Wittenberg.[3]

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Chladni's uncle, Justus Georg Chladni (Chladenius, 1701–65), was a law
professor at University of Wittenberg. Another uncle, Johann Martin
Chladni (1710–59), was a theologian and historian, and professor at
the University of Erlangen and the University of Leipzig.

Parents

Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladenius

was born in 1756 in Wittenberg,
Electorate of Saxony (today Germany).
As a consequence of the Reformation
in the 16th century, Wittenberg had
become the cultural centre of Europe
due to the work of Martin Luther and
Philipp Melanchthon, and the
University Leucorea of Wittenberg Chladni's birthplace,
Mittelstrasse 5 (right),
was considered the most important
Wittenberg.
north of the Alps. In the 18th century,
however, Wittenberg had meanwhile
degraded to the status of a provincial town in Saxony, and the
university as well had lost its great renown.[4][5]

His father, Ernst Martin Chladni (Chladenius, 6.8.1715–4.3.1782 [14]),

was first professor of law (1746), and ten times dean of the law faculty
of the University of Wittenberg. He published almost 50 works, and
was also a court counselor in Saxony and antiques expert.[6][7]

His mother was Johanna Sophia (born Clement, 10.5.1735–6.3.1761,

married in 1753), daughter of a High Court notary
(Hofgerichtsprotonotar) and later lawyer at the Consistory of
Wittenberg, Johann Gottlieb Clement (9.11.1692–24.12.1759, born in
Großbothen(?) near Leipzig, died in Wittenberg), and his wife Anna
Sophia, a daughter of Johann Christoph Wichmannshausen.[15]

After death of his mother, his father remarried Elisabeth Johanna

Charlotte (born Greipziger, 1725–21.4.1801), widow of privy councilor
of the Duke of Württemberg and Lord of Genthe, Meinecke.[8][16]
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Early years
Ernst Florens Friedrich's sister passed away when she was a baby and
he grew up as the only child. Chladni received home education; his
father had very strict, even despotic way of upbringing. Ernst Friedrich
could only leave his study room after his permission; couldn't go even
to their garden other than accompanied by his mother; and was not
allowed to have any friends. At the age of 7 he was already reading
scientific books, studied stars and maps, secretly learning Dutch, and
dreamt about becoming a seafarer.[9][10][11]

Studies

From May 1771 to March 1774 he visited the boarding-school

[Landesschule] of St. Augustinus at Grimma near Leipzig. These
Landesschulen had been established in secularized monasteries after
the reformation, and served as colleges of the Saxonian state for the
future government officials, teachers and Protestant preachers. The
severe education at home continued in Grimma. Chladni was not
allowed to stay at a hostel like the other pupils, but had to live in the
flat of one of his teachers, and therefore was again under permanent
supervision. His father disapproved of his interest in medicine and
insisted that Ernst Friedrich become a lawyer.[12][13][14]

From 1776, Chladni studied law and philosophy (as well as

mathematical and physical geography, physics, biology, and
geometry) at the University of Leipzig, and obtained a philosophy
degree in 1781 and law degree in 1782. Around that time he changed
his surname from Chladenius to Chladni. During his studies he joined
a masonic lodge of Leipzig, Minerva zu den drei Palmen[17]. Upon his
return to Wittenberg, his father arranged a lawyer position for him.[15]

Scientific career
Lecturing in Wittenberg (1783–92)

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After the death of his father in 1782, Chladni's life changed
fundamentally. He felt responsible for his stepmother, which was the
main motivation to stay in Wittenberg, although his financial situation
was difficult. At the University of Wittenberg one of the two professors
in mathematics passed away in 1784, and Chladni applied for the
vacant position. But the position was cancelled, and he had to
abandon his hopes. In 1783–92 he gave lectures, first on legal
subjects, from 1784 on geometry and mathematical geography, and
from 1786 in his real field of research, acoustics.[16][17]

Early experiments in acoustics (from 1782)

He moved to acoustics as a relatively underexplored scientific field at

the time.[18] In 1782 he started with extensive experiments in his flat.
Chladni wrote: "For a long time it was my main activity to analyse such
sound sources, which had not yet been studied. Up to now only
vibrations of strings and vibrations of air in wind instruments were
the subjects of studies. And now I performed experiments on
transversal vibrations of rods, which had been the subject of
theoretical studies of Leonhard Euler and Daniel Bernouilli, and then
on the vibrations of plates, which were an unknown field."[19][20][21]

Exploration of sound figures (from 1785)

First Chladni investigated transversal

vibrations of rods with different
boundary conditions. The violin bow
was the instrument for the
mechanical excitation. The idea for
this came from a publication on the
glass harmonica by the Bach
biographer Nicolaus Forkel. This
source intimately influenced Chladni's
work on instrument making. The
essential idea to the sound patterns Bowing Chladni plate.
came from the study of the works by

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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. In 1777 Lichtenberg succeeded in
making spark discharges in dielectrics visible by decorating the
objects with sulphur and minium powders (see below). This motivated
Chladni to apply fine sand to his plates and rods. With this method of
sound patterns he could confirm the formulas for the characteristic
frequencies of rods, which had been derived theoretically. Chladni
had a sensitive ear. He could discriminate frequencies differing by
less than a semitone. With experiments with vibrating plates with
flexural rigidity - the two-dimensional counterpart to rods - Chladni
opened a field, which had hardly been studied neither theoretically
nor experimentally. Existing theories by Euler and Michael Golovin
had been in contradiction to Chladni's experiments.[22]

Chladni studied systematically the sound patterns of circular, square,

and rectangular plates, by fixing them with his fingers at different
points, thus enforcing at these points the occurence of nodal lines.
The results were published in 1787 in Entdeckungen über die Theorie
des Klanges with 11 plates and a total of 166 figures. At the end of this
book Chladni reminded of the unsolved problem of the mathematical
treatment of flexural vibrations of plates.[23]

Lecture tours (from 1791)

From 1791, after his invention of

sound figures and building his music
instrument (Euphon, see below), also
motivated by lack of money,
throughout his life he was doing
lecture/performance/exhibition tours,
usually lasting several months, to
present his work around Europe, each
time returning for a short period to
Wittenberg. In 1792 he sold his home
in Mittelstrasse 5 (but lived in this
house until the death of his
stepmother in 1801). The first travel
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led him first to Dresden, then to Chladni, demonstrating his
Berlin. Originally he meant primarily experiments in the palais of the
to perform music using his prince of Thurn and Taxis,
Regensburg, 1800.
instruments, but noticed that his
sound figures attracted much more
acclaim and made it central to his
presentations. Chladni's
demonstrations in many royal
academies and scientific institutions
frequently drew large crowds who
were duly impressed with the
aesthetically sophisticated qualities of
vibrating plates. He quickly came to
be known as a "traveling scientist",
and used the visits of various cities to
acquire new contacts among
scientists but also to study various
materials on acoustics in its libraries
Entrance to the house Zur
and archives. He visited Germany Goldenen Kugel, Chladni's home
(Dresden, 1791, c1797; Berlin, Jan–Feb in Wittenberg (1801–13).
1792, Dec 1798–Mar 1799, 1826–Feb
1827; Göttingen, Dec 1792–Jan 1793;
Bremen, Feb 1793; Hamburg, Mar–Apr
1793; Erfurt, Aug 1795; Weimar, 1803;
Munich, c1798, 1812), Denmark
(Copenhagen, Apr 1793, 1797;
Flensburg, 1794), Prussia (Danzig,
1794; Königsberg, 1794; Breslau, Feb–
Apr 1827), Russia (Riga, 1794;
Petersburg, May 1794; Tallinn, 1794),
Austria/Bohemia (Prague, c1797;
Vienna, c1798, 1812; Karlsbad, 1812),
Netherlands (Amsterdam, Dec 1807),
Belgium (Brussels, c1808), France Die Akustik, 1802. View online.

(Paris, Dec 1808–Mar 1810;

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Strasbourg, 1810), Switzerland (Basel, May 1810; Zürich, 1810), Italy
(Turin, October 1810–Apr 1811; Milan, Apr–May 1811; Bologna, 1811;
Florence, May 1811; Venice, 1811), among other places. Between
1802–12 he visited half Europe. In 1815 he started a new period of
journeys, and in lectures included his theory of meteors.[24][25][26][27]

Contact with Lichtenberg (from 1792) and Kempelen

In December 1792–January 1793, Chladni visited Göttingen, where he

met and befriended Lichtenberg. This contact was the beginning of
Chladni's interest in meteors and later his theory of their
extraterrestric origin.[28][29] Lichtenberg was often visited by Wolfgang
von Kempelen who had built a chess automaton to make fun of the
scientists from around Viennese Court and was conducting a serious
research of acoustics (he built a speaking machine, 1769–1804 [18];
published the book Mechanismus der menschlichen Sprache, 1791). He
organised a meeting where Kempelen presented his speaking
machine to Chladni, who later tested and discussed Kempelen's
hypotheses in his books Beiträge zur praktischen Akustik und zur Lehre
vom Instrumentenbau (1821) and Über die Hervorbringung der
menschlichen Sprachlaute (1824).[30]

New home (1801)

In 1801 he moved from his family house to the Zur Goldenen Kugel [To
the Golden Ball] house on Schlossstrasse 10. In this house the future
physicist Wilhelm Weber was born 1804.[31]

Die Akustik (1802)

In 1802 he published his breakthrough work Die Akustik which soon

acquired a status of foundational work of a new scientific field and
him a title of "father of acoustics". It was the first systematic
description of the vibrations of elastic bodies. The arrangement of the
book in chapters on (i) sound generation, (ii) sound propagation, and

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(iii) sound reception was new, too. In the book he compiled,
commented and built upon numerous articles on acoustics found on
his travels across Europe.

An encounter with Goethe (1803)

On the occasion of a visit to Weimar, in January 1803 Chladni met

Goethe to whom he gave a copy of his book. About their first
encounter, Goethe wrote the following in a letter to Schiller: "Doctor
Chladni has arrived and has brought his complete Acoustics in a
quarto volume. I have already read half of it and shall give you a
somewhat agreeable oral report on its content, substance, method,
and form. He belongs to [..] those blissful persons who have not the
faintest idea that there is something as Naturphilosophy and who are
only attentively trying to observe phenomena which they will then
classify and make use of them as well as their natural talent is capable
in the matter and is trained for the matter." They met again in
Goethe's home in June 1812. A few years later, however, Goethe has
made several positive statements on Chladni's behalf in public.[32][33]

Paris (1808–10), meeting Napoleon and translation of Die Akustik

(both 1809)

During his stay in Paris in December

1808 Chladni presented his work at
the French Academy of Sciences
which organised the evaluation
commission consisting of physicists
Étienne de Lacepède, Prony, Hauy,
and music scientists Mehul, Gretry,
and Gossec. His study was met with
very positive feedback and Pierre-
Simon Laplace, together with Gay-
Lussac, Alexander von Humboldt and
Arago, proposed him to translate it to French. Napoleon was also
interested in a demonstration of Chladni's experiments and invited

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him to the Tuilerie Palace through the mediation of Laplace. While
performing artists were rather often invited to court, the invitation of
a scientist was a singularity. In February 1809, Chladni presented
Napoleon (also present were Laplace, La Cépède, Berthollet) his
sound figures, mathematical foundations of acoustics and performed
a composition by Haydn on his Clavicylinder, and the following day
received a 6,000-franc grant to translate his work to French. In doing
so, he encountered a problem. For the German terms Schall, Klang
and Ton, used by Chladni with different meanings, the French
language only knows one concept, namely son, e.g. sound. A
Frenchman he asked about this matter gave him the following
answer: "Notre diablesse de langue ne veut pas se prêter à
l'expression de toutes les idées possibles. Il faut même quelquefois
sacrifier une idée aux caprices de la langue." [Our devil of a language
does not want to lend itself to the expression of all ideas possible.
Sometimes it is even necessary to sacrifice an idea to the caprices of
the language." Chladni seized this opportunity to a thorough
modification, he eliminated the out-of-date and added new ideas. The
French edition was eventually published in November 1809, with
dedication to Napoleon (which caused him trouble after Napoleon
became enemy of the rest of Europe). Chladni left Paris in March
1810.[34][35][36][37]

Move to Kemberg (1813)

In the summer of 1813, Chladni suffered a great loss. The remnants of

Napoleon's army were entangled in numerous fights and skirmishes
in Saxony after the retreat from Moscow, returning to France.
Wittenberg was besieged by the Prussians, so Chladni was compelled
to move to a dwelling with a single room in the small town of
Kemberg, situated 15 km to the south of his home town (where he
was visited in 1821 by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy[38] among others).
In the autumn of the same year the flat he left in Wittenberg burnt
out, flared up by a fire rocket which had hit the neighbouring house.
Chladni deplored the loss of many objects dear to him, including
excerpts and notes on experiments. He had been, however, lucky to
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have rescued most of his belongings, among them the Euphon and
the Clavicylinder. A single room served him as bedroom, workshop,
and drawing room at the same time. He spent the rest of his life in
Kemberg, only interrupted by the still numerous lecture tours.[39][40]

Optics

In Munich, Chladni met Joseph von Fraunhofer, a physicist who

sparked his interest in optics.[41]

Room acoustics

In Die Akustik, a book with 310 pages, room acoustics took up only 7
pages, reflecting the state of the knowledge in 1802. At the beginning
of the 19th century room acoustics was treated in geometrical terms.
The importance of resonances had been recognized, and it was
known that the ear can distinguish at most 9 different sound impulses
per second. But on sound absorption and related questions there was
a lot of obscurity.[42]

During a stay in Berlin in 1825 Chladni met the architect Carl Theodor
Ottmer, who showed him his drafts for the new building of the
Singakademie in Berlin (today Maxim Gorki Theatre). The
Singakademie was a choir conducted by Carl Friedrich Zelter and
devoted itself to the performance of works by Johann Sebastian Bach,
and the building became one of the best music halls in Germany until
its devastation in 1943.[43]

Weber brothers

Chladni's students, brothers Ernst Heinrich and Wilhelm Eduard

Weber, took upon Chladni's research of acoustics and solved many of
his outlined questions[19][20][21][22][23]. Resulting book, Wellenlehre,
auf Experimente gegründet (1825)[24], is dedicated to Chladni. He
tested their findings both in theory and experiment and did not find
any errors.[44] (W. E. Weber, together with Carl Friedrich Gauss, went
on to construct the first electromagnetic telegraph in 1833 [25].)

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Inspired by the acoustic research of the Weber brothers, Chladni
resumed his work from Die Akustik, but the resulting book Kurze
Übersicht der Schall- und Klanglehre (1827) did not reach level of its
famous forerunner.[45]

Languages and art

Through reading fiction Chladni kept himself fluent in Greek, Latin,

Dutch, French, English, and Italian, and also spoke oriental languages
and dialects. He had a habit of reading non-German literature in its
original language. Thanks to his extensive travels he also had a strong
knowledge of painting and sculpture.[46]

Death

In February 1827 Chladni went from Berlin to Breslau where he gave

lectures. He passed away in the night of 3 to 4 April. The evening
before his death he met the mineralogist Henrik Steffens who
reported on this meeting in his memoirs[47]. Chladni was born in the
same year as Mozart, and died in the same year as Beethoven. He
lived a nomad life from his mid-30s and according to his own words
never received an acceptable offer of a professorship (despite the
offers for positions in Berlin, Jena, and Dresden in the late 1810s).[48]
Chladni never married and had no kids. In his will, he bequeathed his
collection of 41 meteors[49] to the Berlin Mineralogy Museum, 5000
Thaler to his tenant farmer [Hauswirth], 600 to the poor, and 600 to
the city of Kemberg for a new tower clock and paving.[50] The site of
his grave had been forgotten.

He gave a detailed survey of his life in the introduction to the French

edition of Akustik (1809) as well as in his Neue Beyträge (1817).

Legacy

Goethe, who himself was often criticized for his diverse study of
natural sciences, wrote in 1817: "Who will criticize our Chladni, the
proud of the nation? The world owes to him gratitude, since he made
the sound visible. And what is more distant from this subject than the
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study of the meteorites? Not at all, but that an ingenious man feels
the impetus to study two natural phenomena which are far away
from each other, and investigates both of them continuously. Let us
be grateful for the benefit we gained from it!"[51]

A small lunar impact crater that lies near the northwest edge of Sinus
Medii, in the central part of the Moon, is named after Chladni[26], as
well as asteroid no. 5053.

In Doktor Faustus (1947), Thomas Mann based the character of the

father of the hero of the novel, Adrian Leverkühn, on Chladni. He gets
introduced in its introductory chapter. This father likes to "speculate",
e.g. "to labour on nature, to stimulate phenomena to tempt it by
exposing its work through experiments." These experiments are
rather peculiar. There are drops moving like amoebae and eating up
each other. There are structures grown in saline solutions suggesting
to be mosses or algae. And there are sounds appearing in the form of
geometrical patterns. All these phenomena and experimenting
anyway in the poet's eyes are the work of the "tempter".[52]

Work

Rejection of the monochord

In 1787, Chladni explained, on the basis of his sound patterns, how

various sounds coexist in the vibration of the same body. But this
simultaneous presence of com-possible sounds, he said, cannot be
reduced, in a Pythagorean way, to the overtones of a fundamental:
there are also "inharmonic and irrational relationships", due to the
irregularities of the vibrating body.[27] This is why Chladni dismisses
the monochord, the instrument that was the basis of acoustic theory
and calculation since Greek antiquity; as Chladni writes in the
introduction to his Akustik: "a string is only one sort of sonorous
body," among many others. This dismissal of the Pythagorean
monochord and calculation is Chladni’s revolution, his modernity. It

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opens the possibility of experimenting with all vibrating bodies, while
his sound patterns allow us to see their complex vibrating
structure.[53]

The debate over the vibrating string was part of the gradual divorce of
acoustics from music that took place in the 18th century. Music, as
one of the four sciences of the medieval quadrivium, was traditionally
part of mathematics. The tradition still held in the 18th century to
some extent. The beginning of acoustics as a branch of physics is
often dated from Chladni's Entdeckungen (1787), but throughout the
century natural philosophers raised questions about the production
and propagation of sound that were not properly part of
harmonics.[54]

Tonometer

The problem of Chladni's time was

that it was not possible to determine
frequency of particular tone (pitch) of
the sound body (string, rod,
membrane) since its vibrations were
too fast to be followed and counted
by the eye. Based on Mersenne’s laws
of vibrating strings (1636/37) – the
number of vibrations of a string is
inversely proportional to the length of
the string, and, proportional to the
square root of its tension (which were Vibrations of a metal rod.
further improved by Joseph
Sauveur[28]) – Chladni constructed a tonometer (1800). The idea was
to attach one end of the rod long enough to count its vibrations on its
other end (e.g. 4 per second). By shortening it to its half the tone and
frequency would increase four times (square of 2). Chladni would
shorten the rod until its tone would correspond to the tone of the
string whose frequency he was looking for.[29][55] Chladni constructed
a tonometer made of bars, whose rates of vibration was determined
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as above. With this he hoped to be able to determine the rate of
vibration of any sonorous body whatever. However the results given
by experiment only approximate those demanded by theory.[30]

Chladni figures (Klangfiguren)

One of Chladni's best-known

achievements was inventing a
technique to show the various modes
of vibration of a rigid surface. First
published in 1787 in his book
Entdeckungen über die Theorie des
Klanges, the technique consists of
drawing a bow over a (circular,
square, or rectangular) plate or
membrane whose surface is lightly
covered with sand. When stroked, a
given plate will resonate at one of its
natural frequencies. The sand
Chladni figures, from Neue
bounces about on the plate until
Beyträge (1817).[4]
settling at nodal points (areas of zero
movement) thereby producing
intricate patterns. These patterns are
now called Chladni figures.[31]

The phenomenon was earlier

mentioned by Leonardo da Vinci in his
notebook, and as well discussed by
Galileo Galilei. He noticed that small
pieces of bristle laid on the sounding-
board of a musical instrument, were
violently agitated on some parts of
the surface, while on other parts they
did not appear to move, and wrote
about it in his work Dialogo sopra i due Chladni figures, from Neue
massimi sistemi del mondo [Dialogue Beyträge (1817).[5]

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Concerning the Two Chief World Systems] (1632). Later, Robert Hooke
of Oxford University proposed to observe the vibrations of a bell by
strewing flour upon it (c1680).[32]

Chladni did not mention the experiments of Galilei and Hooke in his
own writings. Regardless of whether he was aware of them or not, he
was the first to examine the phenomenon systematically. His original
inspiration were the electrical figures of Lichtenberg, who made the
experiment of scattering an electrified powder over an electrified
resin cake; the arrangement of the powder revealing the electric
condition of the surface[33]. In 1785, Chladni set out to explore this
phenomenon from the perspective of acoustics.[56] He explained in a
biographical preface to the French edition of Die Akustik (1809):

"As an admirer of music, the elements of which I had begun to learn rather late, that is, in
my nineteenth year, I noticed that the science of acoustics was more neglected than most
other portions of physics. This excited in me the desire to make good the defect, and by
new discovery to render some service to this part of science. In 1785 I had observed that a
plate of glass or metal gave different sounds when it was struck at different places, but I
could nowhere find any information regarding the corresponding modes of vibration. At
this time there appeared in the journals some notices of an instrument made in Italy by the
Abbé Mazzocchi, consisting of bells, to which one or two violin bows were applied. This
suggested to me the idea of employing a violin bow to examine the vibrations of different
sonorous bodies. When I applied the bow to a round plate of glass fixed at its middle it
gave different sounds, which, compared with each other, were (as regards the number of
their vibrations) equal to the squares of 2, 3, 4, 5, &c.; but the nature of the motions to
which these sounds corresponded, and the means of producing each of them at will, were
yet unknown to me. The experiments on the electric figures formed on a plate of resin,
discovered and published by Lichtenberg, in the memoirs of the Royal Society of
Göttingen, made me presume that the different vibratory motions of a sonorous plate
might also present different appearances, if a little sand or some other similar substance
were spread on the surface. On employing this means, the first figure that presented itself
to my eyes upon the circular plate already mentioned, resembled a star with ten or twelve
rays, and the very acute sound, in the series alluded to, was that which agreed with the
square of the number of diametral lines."[34][35]

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Table 1 from Entdeckungen über die Theorie des
Klanges, 1787.

Table 2 from Entdeckungen über die Theorie des

Klanges, 1787.

Table 3 from Entdeckungen über die Theorie des

Klanges, 1787.

Table 4 from Entdeckungen über die Theorie des

Klanges, 1787.

Table 5 from Entdeckungen über die Theorie des

Klanges, 1787.

Table 6 from Entdeckungen über die Theorie des

Klanges, 1787.

Table 7 from Entdeckungen über die Theorie des

Klanges, 1787.

Table 8 from Entdeckungen über die Theorie des

Klanges, 1787.

Table 9 from Entdeckungen über die Theorie des

Klanges, 1787.

Table 10 from Entdeckungen über die Theorie des

Klanges, 1787.

Table 11 from Entdeckungen über die Theorie des

Klanges, 1787.

Table 1 from Die Akustik, 1802.

Table 2 from Die Akustik, 1802.

Table 3 from Die Akustik, 1802.

Table 4 from Die Akustik, 1802.

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 Table 5 from Die Akustik, 1802.

Table 6 from Die Akustik, 1802.

Table 7 from Die Akustik, 1802.

Table 8 from Die Akustik, 1802.

Table 9 from Die Akustik, 1802.

Table 10 from Die Akustik, 1802.

Table 11 from Die Akustik, 1802.

Birth of modern acoustics

‘Acoustics’ was an experimental investigative

enterprise in the early 19th century. The group of so-
called ‘acousticians’ included Chladni, Young, Félix
Savart, Colladon, Faraday, Charles Wheatstone,
Lissajous, Tyndall, Koenig, A. Mayer, etc. Their
experimental works were summarized in John
Tyndall's Sound (1867)[36]. In addition to
‘acousticians’, there were researchers who did
research theoretically on the making and
transmitting of sound in the mathematical manner.
This group included Bernoulli, Jean LeRond
d'Alembert, Euler, Joseph Louis Lagrange, Poisson,
Sophie Germain, G. Ohm, Kirchhoff, Riemann,
Donkin, S. Earnshaw, etc. For them analysis was the
central method of dealing with problems associated
with sound. Their investigations were not closely
connected to the empirical and experimental findings gathered by the
‘acousticians’.[37](p 2765)

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19/50
20/50
21/50
Further developments in acoustics

The influence of Chladni's Traité

d'acoustique (1809) on the scientific
research in France shows up in the
work by Félix Savart, who was the
direct successor of Chladni in France
in the field of experimental acoustics.
With a gearwheel siren with a
diameter of 82 cm and 720 teeth built Savart's toothed wheel.
by Savart a precise measurement of
the frequency of tones became possible. Savart measured the upper
limit of audibility and found the high value of 24,000 Hz.[57]

In Germany, Hermann von Helmholtz wrote his Die Lehre von den
Tonempfindungen 60 years later.

An unsolved problem in Chladni's days was the tone quality, the

timbre. For a long time it was known that a sound of the same pitch,
produced with different musical instruments, has different qualities.
Chladni assumed the coexistence of weak noises (schwache Geräusche)
with each sound, being responsible for the different tone qualities.
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Georg Simon Ohm solved the problem in 1843. He found that in the
human ear a Fourier harmonic analysis of the tone takes place. In
addition the ratio of intensities of harmonic fundamentals is
important, whereas phase differences between the harmonics are
irrelevant. Harmonics had been a research field in acoustics, which
was underestimated strongly by Chladni.[58]

Mathematical solutions of Chladni figures

In his Akustik, Chladni didn't offer mathematical explanation of his

figures and neither of other acoustic phenomena.

Sophie Germain

After Chladni's audience to Napoleon in 1808, he encouraged the

Paris Academy of Sciences to announce a prize of 3,000 Francs for
mathematical explanation of Chladni figures, particularly "to give the
mathematical theory of the vibration of an elastic surface and to
compare the theory to experimental evidence", which then spurred a
plethora of research in waves and acoustics. The award was given in
1816 to the mathematician Sophie Germain for her work Recherches
sur la théorie des surfaces élastiques[59],[38][60]. Her explanation was
incomplete (she found the correct differential equation, but the
hypothesis she applied for the derivation of this equation was partly
incorrect leading to the wrong boundary conditions), but she received
the prize all the same since it was acknowledged that her treatise
signified an essential progress.[61]

Charles Wheatstone's approximation by cosine and sine

functions

Charles Wheatstone had tried in 1833[62] to approximate Chladni

figures using sine and cosine functions.[63] He showed that in square
and rectangular plates every figure, however complicated, was the
resultant of two or more sets of isochronous parallel vibrations; and
by means of simple geometrical relations he carried out the principle
of the ‘superposition of small motions’ without the aid of any
profound mathematical analysis, and succeeded in predicting the
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curves that given modes of vibration should produce.[39]

G. Kirchhoff's solution for circular

plate

Kirchhoff came up with the correct

mathematical model in 1850[64],
treating Chladni figures on a square
plate as eigenpairs (eigenvalues and
corresponding eigenfunctions) of a
biharmonic operator. He also
managed to solve the Chladni
problem for the special case of a
circular plate, which, due to
symmetry, is much easier to handle.
For other configurations, the partial
differential eigenvalue problem with
the free boundary conditions simply
proved to be too difficult to solve.[65]

W. Voigt's solution for rectangular

plate with two or four clamped Sample from Ritz's
boundaries by elementary mathematical solution of
Chladni figures, 1909. Download
integration
in PDF.
In the case of clamped boundaries,
the problem greatly simplifies, and W. Voigt found the general
solution in 1893[66] for a rectangular plate with two or four clamped
boundaries by elementary integration. Toward the end of the 19th
century, the great expert in sound, John William Strutt, later Baron
Rayleigh, summarized the situation in (1894): "The problem of a
rectangular plate, whose edges are free, is one of great difficulty, and
has for the most part resisted attack"[40][67].[68]

Walter Ritz's solution

[69] 24/50
In his groundbreaking paper (1909) [69], Walter Ritz presented a
method for computing Chladni figures: instead of trying to solve the
partial differential eigenvalue problem directly (and neither through
boundary conditions of the problem), he proposed to use the
principle of energy minimization (Prinzip der kleinsten Wirkung), from
which even those equations and conditions could be derived.[70]

Chladni figures of irregularly shaped plates have experienced a

surprising topicality nowadays. The reason is the equivalence
between the stationary wave equation, the Helmholtz equation, and
the stationary Schrödinger equation for a particle moving freely in a
box with reflecting walls. This enables the examination of such
quantum billiards, and, in the case of irregularly formed walls, of the
quantum chaos by means of vibrating plates[41]. Nodal patterns are
also of central importance in totally different domains, in fields of
light[42], in earthquake damage pattern[43], and even in pattern
formation in the visual cortex[44].[71]

Chladni figures in Naturphilosophy

The very fact that Chladni's work with the sound figures was triggered
by Lichtenberg's electrostatic figures for which he was trying to find
an acoustic analogue, coincided with a naturphilosophische search for
symmetries and signs of hidden relationships among natural
forces.[72]

According to the most general version of this romantic theory,

manifest for example in the writings of Herder, all of nature speaks
through its form, and the physiognomy of the natural world is cast as
language, the "book of nature" that merely awaits correct deciphering.
A more restricted variant holds that only those aspects of nature
which have a formal feature reminiscent of inscription are to be
described as hieroglyphs. Here nature seems to be saying something
in a language that the human race can no longer understand, that it
has forgotten. But this language is in fact the most ordinary language,
the Ur-alphabet in which creation was, as it were, spelled out. Indeed,
unlike all subsequent languages, what marks this primordial language
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is that it does not require any code at all since, here, sign and referent
are the same. These hieroglyphs are what they mean. Their
unintelligibility today is simply an index of the extent to which the
present era has lost touch with that nature. For the German
romantics, there were generally only two ways to reestablish contact
with this Ur-language: either through the direct, but ephemeral,
recreation of that language through poetry, or the more tedious, step-
by-step relearning of that alphabet through the scientific exploration
of nature. The task of physics was thus to make legible once again the
currently unintelligible hieroglyphs of nature. Indeed, for the
romantics, the discoveries of contemporary physics seemed to
confirm the promising visions of the poets.[73]

Through this reading, Lichtenberg's figures (1777) made the then

mysterious phenomenon of electricity finally become readable. With
Chladni figures (1787), for the first time, one could associate acoustic
phenomena to specific graphic figures which, most importantly, were
"drawn" by the sounds themselves. These were not arbitrary but were
rather in some sort of a "necessary" - indexical - relation to the
sounds.[74]

Ørsted

This very problem was explored in 1806, when the prominent

Naturphilosoph Hans Christian Ørsted--who would become famous for
his discovery of electromagnetism in 1820--used Chladni's technique
(using alcohol and lycopodion powder instead of sand) in a further
effort to disclose a connection between sound and electricity.[75]

Ritter (via Benjamin)

Both Lichtenberg's and Chladni's figures intrigued another romantic

physicist, Johann Wilhelm Ritter. In them, Ritter saw nature's own form
of script-Ur-images and hieroglyphs that constituted the true alphabet
of the Book of Nature. He wrote in 1810[76]:

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 "It would be beautiful if what became externally clear here were also exactly what the
sound pattern is for us inwardly: a light pattern, fire-writing. [..] Every sound would then
have its own letter directly to hand [..] That inward connection of word and script - so
powerful that we write when we speak [..] has long interested me. Tell me: how do we
transform the thought, the idea, into the wqord; and do we ever have a thought or an idea
without its hieroglyph, its letter, its script? Truly, it is so: but we do not usually think of it.
But once, when human nature was more powerful, it really was more extensively thought
about; and this is proved by the existence of word and script. Their original, and absolute,
simultaneity was rooted in the fact that the organ of speech itself writes in order to speak.
The letter alone speaks, or rather: word and script are, at source, one, and neither is
possible without the other [..] Every sound pattern is an electric pattern, and every electric
pattern is a sound pattern. [..] My aim [..] was therefore to re-discover, or else to find the
primeval or natural script by means of electricity. [..] In reality the whole of creation is
language, and so is literally created by the word, the created and creating word itself [..]
But the letter is inextricably bound up with this word both in general and in particular. [..]
All the plastic arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, etc. belong pre-eminently among
such script, and developments and derivations of it."[45], quoted in Walter Benjamin[77].

Ritter held the opinion that material images, like Chladni figures,
entailed the true language--a pictorial language--of science. He
reveled in the pure multiformity of the Klangfiguren, their symmetry,
and their relationship to other forms in nature. While the
mathematical approach to sound was by no means excised, it was this
respect for the image and the attitude that pictures could give
meaningful signs of phenomena that excited the Naturphilosophen.[78]

Young

The natural philosopher, Rosetta stone sleuth, and undulatory optical

theorist Thomas Young embraced the pictorial approach to the study
of sound. In 1800, Young introduced a new technique for obtaining a
visual image of the motion of a vibrating string, while referring to
Chladni figures. He also pioneered a means for creating permanent
inscriptions of sonic vibrations (1807). In the 19th century, Wilhelm
Weber and Guillaume Wertheim, as well as many other investigators,
devised related ways to preserve the traces of styluses attached to
sounding bodies, such as rods and tuning forks.[79]

Purkyně
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The research of Chladni figures in the 1810s–20s by the physiologist
Jan Evangelista Purkyně, which he later discussed with Goethe, is also
notable. For more, see the article on Purkyně's work.

Chladni figures in modern aesthetics

Towards the end of the 19th century, the identification of recording

instruments and graphs with language became less obvious, but the
association was not entirely lost. German philosophers such as
Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin[80] and Theodor Adorno carried
the pursuit of graphical "ur-languages" from Chladni and Ritter into
the aesthetics of recorded music.

Nietzsche

Nietzsche had referred to the sound figures in his On Truth and Falsity
in Their Ultramoral Sense (1873)[46][47]:[81]

"One can imagine a man who is quite deaf and has never had a sensation of tone and of
music; just as this man will possibly marvel at Chladni's sound figures in the sand, will
discover their cause in the vibrations of the string, and will then proclaim that now he
knows what man calls 'tone'; even so does it happen to us all with language. When we talk
about trees, colours, snow and flowers, we believe we know something about the things
themselves, and yet we only possess metaphors of the things, and these metaphors do not
in the least correspond to the original essentials."[48]

Adorno

Adorno in his essay "The Form of the Phonograph Record" (1934) saw
in Chladni's sound figures a kind of primal gramophony.[82] For him,
the mechanical reproduction of music reversed the process of turning
signs (the musical score) into music and instead turned music into
language:[83]

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 "This occurs at the price of its immediacy, yet with the hope that, once fixed in this way,
it will some day become readable as the 'last remaining universal language since the
construction of the tower', a language whose determined yet encrypted expressions are
contained in each of its 'phrases'. If, however, notes were still the mere signs for music,
then, through the curves of the needle on the phonograph record, music approaches
decisively its true character as writing. Decisively, because this writing can be recognized
as true language to the extent that it relinquishes its being as mere signs: inseparably
committed to the sound that inhabits this and no other acoustic groove. If the productive
force of music has expired in the phonograph records, if the latter have not produced a
form through their technology, they instead transform the most recent sound of old
feelings into an archaic text of knowledge to come. [..] A good part of this is due to
physics, at least to Chladni's sound figures, to which--according to the discovery of one of
the most important contemporary aesthetic theorists [here Adorno means Walter
Benjamin]--Johann Wilhelm Ritter referred as the script-like Ur-images of sound."[84]

For Adorno, the phonograph record had the advantage over the
musical score in that it had written on it a language, not "mere signs".
The machine avoided the trap of semiosis--the "mechanical"
assignment of mere signs to music--and preserved its aesthetic value
in a new language. He attributed the source of this argument to
Chladni and Ritter, who first saw the possibility of "inscribing music
without it ever having sounded".[85] In its reification of both sound and
time, for Adorno, the phonograph record recalled Chladni figures in
another sense as well: where music writes itself there is no writing
subject. The record eliminates the subject (and the concomitant
economy of intentionality) from the musical inscription.[86]

Cymatics

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Medical doctor and Anthroposophist
Hans Jenny (1904–72) extended
Chladni's explorations (also inspired
by systems theory), conducting
rigorous experiments with liquids,
and using oscillators for precise
calibration of audio signals. Jenny
delved deeply into the many types of
periodic phenomena but especially
the visual display of sound. He Hans Jenny, Cymatics, 2001.
pioneered the use of laboratory Download in PDF. On the cover:
grown piezoelectric crystals, which Light refracting through a small
were quite costly at that time. sample of water (about 1.5 cm
Hooking them up to amplifiers and in diameter) under the influence
frequency generators, the crystals of vibration. Although there
appear to be 12 elements
functioned as transducers, converting
comprising this figure, closer
the frequencies into vibrations that
examination reveals that it
were strong enough to set the plates
consists of 2 opposed hexagonal
into resonance. Jenny used a wide elements.
variety of different materials,
including glass, copper, wood, steel, cardboard and ceramics for the
plates, on which he was spreading fine powder lycopodium spores of
a club moss and quartz sand. He also performed a series of
experiments with liquid glycerin in water and light refracted in a single
drop of water containing fine particles that reflect the light source, in a
series of experiments that yielded his most famous images (see cover
of his book). Much of this work is documented in still photos which
were compiled into two volumes of Kymatik [Cymatics] published in
1967 and 1972, and republished in 2001 as a single edition[87].[49]
Later, he speculated about the potential healing powers of certain
sound frequencies, thought that has been presented as fact by some
of his kookier followers.

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 Hans Jenny

Chladni figures in the arts

Alvin Lucier's piece The Queen of the South (1972) is using Chladni
figures (Lucier is said to be influenced by Jenny's book on
cymatics).[50]

Jenny's work was also followed up by Center for Advanced Visual

Studies (CAVS) founder György Kepes at MIT. His work Flame Orchard
included an acoustically vibrated piece of sheet metal in which small
holes had been drilled in a grid. Small flames of gas burned through
these holes and thermodynamic patterns were made visible by this
setup.

Photographer, philosopher and Cymatic researcher, Alexander

Lauterwasser has used finely crafted crystal oscillators to resonate
steel plates covered with fine sand and also to vibrate small samples
of water in Petri dishes. His first book, Water Sound Images (2006),
features imagery of light reflecting off of the surface of water set into
motion by sound sources ranging from pure sine waves, to music by
Ludwig van Beethoven, Karlheinz Stockhausen, electroacoustic group
Kymatik (who often record in surround sound ambisonics), and
overtone singing.[51] (Video), (Video).

Carsten Nicolai's Milch (Milk) (2000) reveals how sound frequencies

ranging from 10 to 150 Hz, almost imperceptible to the ear, alter
patterns of disturbances they caused in milk.[52]

In Protrude, Flow (2001) by Sachiko Kodama and Minako Takeno,

sounds in the exhibition space, including those of the audience,
interactively transform three-dimensional patterns in black magnetic
fluid, which appears to be choreographed to its sonic
environment.[53](Video).
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 Three stills from The Queen of the South,
Alvin Lucier, performed by the SAIC
Sinfonietta.

Carsten Nicolai, Milch, 2000. At 50 Hz. [1]

Sachiko Kodama and Minako Takeno, Protrude,

Flow, 2001.[2]

Instrument design

Variations of this technique are still commonly used in the design and
construction of acoustic instruments such as violins, guitars, and
cellos. Since the 20th century it has become more common to place a
loudspeaker driven by an electronic signal generator over or under
the plate to achieve a more accurate adjustable frequency.

Music instruments
Since at least 1738, a musical
instrument called a Glassspiel or
Verillon created by filling 18 beer
glasses with varying amounts of water
was popular in Europe. The beer
glasses would be struck by wooden
mallets shaped like spoons to
produce "church and other solemn
music". Benjamin Franklin was
sufficiently impressed by a verillon Chladni's first Euphon, 1790.
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performance on a visit to London in
1757 that he created his own
instrument, the "armonica" in 1761.

Franklin's armonica inspired several

other instruments, including two
created by Chladni. In 1790, Chladni
invented the musical instrument
called Euphon (e.g. beautiful sound;
not to be confused with the brass
instrument euphonium) composed of
Clavicylinder built for Chladni by
glass rods and steel bars made to
Luigi Concone, Turin, 1811.
sound through rubbing with
moistened fingers. Chladni also improved on the Hooke's "musical
cylinder" (or "string phone", of 1672) to produce another instrument,
the Clavicylinder (1799)[54], which however did not get as popular as
Franklin's armonica at all.

Chladni described his Clavicylinder in the following way:

"The Clavi-cylinder contains a set of keys, and behind them a glass cylinder, seven
centimeters (about three inches) in diameter, which is turned by means of a pedal, and
loaded wheel. This cylinder is not the sounding body, but it produces the sound by friction
on the interior mechanism. The sounds may be prolonged at pleasure, with all the
gradations of crescendo, and diminuendo, in proportion as the pressure on the keys is
increased or diminished. This instrument- is never out of tune. It contains four octaves and
an half, from ut, the lowest in the harpsichord, up to fa."[55]

Meteorites
In 1794, Chladni published Über den Ursprung der von Pallas
gefundenen, in which he proposed that meteorites have an
extraterrestrial origin. This was a controversial statement at the time,
since meteorites were thought to be of volcanic origin. With this book
Chladni also became one of the founders of modern meteorite
research.

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Chladni was initially ridiculed for his claims of an outer space origin
for meteorites, but the important minds of his period agreed with this
view, including Lichtenberg and Humboldt, and his writings sparked
scientific curiosity that eventually led more researchers to support his
theory. In 1795 a large stony meteorite (c28 kg) was observed during
its fall to earth at a cottage outside of Wold Newton, Yorkshire,
England. A piece of this ordinary chondrite, known as the Wold
Cottage meteorite, was provided to British chemist Edward Howard
who, along with French mineralogist Jacques de Bournon, carefully
analyzed the elemental composition of the meteorite and concluded
that an extraterrestrial origin was likely. In 1803 a meteor shower over
L'Aigle, France peppered the town with over 3000 fragments of
meteorites with hundreds of witnesses to the stones falling. The
L'Aigle meteor shower was investigated by French physicist and
astronomer Jean Baptiste Biot, under commission of the French
Minister of the Interior. Unlike Chladni's book and the scientific
publication by Howard and de Bournon, Biot's article was a popular
and lively report on meteorites that convinced a number of people of
the veracity of Chladni's initial insights.

Discovery of longitudinal vibrations

When the bow had an acute angle to

the string, Chladni heard notes which
were 3 to 5 octaves higher than the
usual tones. At first he examined the
phenomenon with strings and then
with rods from different materials. Longitudinal vibrations of rods.
Thus Chladni discovered longitudinal
vibrations (or dilatational vibrations) of bodies. In 1796 he gave a
lecture in Erfurt at the Kurfürstlich Mainzische Akademie nützlicher
Wissenschaften and presented first results of his experiments on this
subject. Chladni now distinguished between transversal and
longitudinal vibrations as it is usual today.[88]

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Looking into Chladni's last book from 1827, one notes a confusion of
notation on this subject in papers of other authors. Chladni found that
the frequencies are reciprocal to the length of the string or the rod. If
the diameter or the tension of the string is changed there are only
negligible variations of the frequency for the longitudinal vibrations.
Chladni had difficulties to find the dependence of the frequency on
the density of the material. When Chladni investigated cylindrical rods,
he discovered their torsional vibrations. In the first publication in 1796
and 1797 on this topic one gets the impression that he classifies this
type of vibrations as a third class of vibrations in addition to the
transversal and longitudinal ones. But in the later publications he
argues against this possible misunderstanding and denotes these
vibrations a special form of transversal vibrations.[89]

Weber brothers in 1825 had an idea, how to make longitudinal

vibrations visible. They used glass tubes, and distributed dry sand in
the interior of the tubes. The tube was hold horizontally and excited
to longitudinal vibrations by rubbing the tube. The grains of sand
started to move and formed little piles. This method was further
developed by August Kundt in 1866 to the well-known method of dust
figures.[90]

Measuring the speed of sound in solids and gases

Chladni must have noticed quickly that the technique of longitudinal
vibrations can be used to measure the sound velocity in sound bodies.
To this end he applied an indirect method. At that time only the
velocity of sound in air was known (by work of Pierre Gassendi, begun
in 1635). Chladni was assuming that the longitudinal vibrations of air
in cylindrical form (e.g. in an organ pipe) are analogous to the
longitudinal vibrations of a rod. Rods of a material which is examined
will be fixed in the centre, e.g., for the fundamental vibration the
length of the rod is half the wavelength of the tone. This tone is now
compared with the fundamental vibration of an organ pipe with the
same length, it shows the same vibrational state. With the velocity of

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sound in air, Chladni could measure the velocity of sound in several
solids (tin, silver, copper, glass, iron, several kinds of woods). He
published the results in 1797.[91][56][92]

In 1798 Chladni visited the chemist and botanist Franz von Jacquin in
Vienna, and in his laboratory he did experiments to determine the
velocity of sound in gases. In Wittenberg Chladni lacked the necessary
equipment to carry out difficult scientific experiments, therefore he
often used the devices of other scientists when visiting them on his
journeys. To determine the velocity of sound of gases Chladni used
the same idea he applied earlier for solids. He compared the tone of
an organ pipe in a special gas with the tone of this pipe in air. Thus he
obtained the speed of sound in oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide,
nitrogen oxide and hydrogen.[93]

Vibrations of tuning forks

Musicians had used tuning forks since
their invention in 1711 by John Shore,
but they were not considered worthy
of attention by scientists until the
work of Ernst Chladni, who was the
first to systematically investigate their
vibrations.[57][58][59].

Chladni found that a tuning fork in its

fundamental oscillation may be
looked upon as the flexural vibration
of a rod with two nodal points. If this
rod is bent to a fork, the nodal points
in the middle approach each other. If
A tuning fork mounted on a
the tuning fork is struck with a mallet,
sounding-box.
the higher eigenvibrations, being
unharmonious to the fundamental vibration, are excited only weakly
and decay very quickly. In 1826 Chladni published further studies on
the tuning fork. Rotating a tuning fork about 360 degrees he noticed

36/50
four maxima and minima of intensity. If the forks vibrate out of
phase, he argued, the teeth periodically approach each other and
depart from each other. In the latter case the air experiences a
velocity in outward direction. At the same time the spacing between
the teeth is extended, and the air moves to the inside. Between these
regions there must be directions, where the air has the velocity zero.
After a half-period all velocities change their signs, with an analogous
change in the emission pattern.[94]

Chladni's law
In Die Akustik (1802) Chladni observed that the addition of one nodal
circle raised the frequency of a circular plate by about the same
amount as adding two nodal diameters, a relationship that Rayleigh
(1894) called Chladni's law.[60]

Notes
1. ↑ RumanovskýStadtrucker 1961, pp. 13–14
2. ↑ Mešterová 2006, p. 127
3. ↑ Mešterová 2006, pp. 127–128
4. ↑ Ullmann 2007, pp. 25–26
5. ↑ Stöckmann 2007, p. 15
6. ↑ RumanovskýStadtrucker 1961, pp. 14–15
7. ↑ Mešterová 2006, p. 128
8. ↑ RumanovskýStadtrucker 1961, p. 20
9. ↑ RumanovskýStadtrucker 1961, pp. 14–16
10. ↑ Mešterová 2006, p. 128
11. ↑ Stöckmann 2007, pp. 15–16
12. ↑ RumanovskýStadtrucker 1961, pp. 18–19
13. ↑ Ullmann 2007, p. 26
14. ↑ Stöckmann 2007, p. 16
15. ↑ RumanovskýStadtrucker 1961, pp. 18–19
16. ↑ RumanovskýStadtrucker 1961, p. 21
17. ↑ Ullmann 2007, p. 27
18. ↑ RumanovskýStadtrucker 1961, p. 22
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19. ↑ RumanovskýStadtrucker 1961, p. 24
20. ↑ Ullmann 1996, p. 14
21. ↑ Ullmann 2007, p. 27
22. ↑ Ullmann 2007, p. 27
23. ↑ Ullmann 2007, p. 27
24. ↑ RumanovskýStadtrucker 1961, pp. 28–29
25. ↑ Ullmann 2007, pp. 28–30
26. ↑ Ullmann 1996, pp. 47–51
27. ↑ Ullmann 1996, pp. 117–121
28. ↑ Ullmann 1996, p. 53
29. ↑ Ullmann 2007, p. 28
30. ↑ RumanovskýStadtrucker 1961, pp. 34–37
31. ↑ Ullmann 2007, p. 28
32. ↑ Stöckmann 2007, pp. 18–19
33. ↑ Ullmann 1996, pp. 115–116
34. ↑ Melde 1866, pp. 14–16
35. ↑ RumanovskýStadtrucker 1961, pp. 43–49
36. ↑ Stöckmann 2007
37. ↑ Ullmann 2007, p. 30
38. ↑ Heise 2007, p. 3
39. ↑ Melde 1866, p. 18
40. ↑ Stöckmann 2007, p. 21
41. ↑ Ullmann 2007, p. 30
42. ↑ Ullmann 2007, p. 30
43. ↑ Ullmann 2007, pp. 30–31
44. ↑ RumanovskýStadtrucker 1961, pp. 51–52
45. ↑ RumanovskýStadtrucker 1961, p. 52
46. ↑ RumanovskýStadtrucker 1961, p. 53
47. ↑ Steffens 1844, pp. 291–297
48. ↑ Stöckmann 2007, p. 22
49. ↑ Ullmann 2007, p. 30
50. ↑ Melde 1866, p. 37
51. ↑ Goethe 1817
52. ↑ Stöckmann 2007, p. 19
53. ↑ Szendy 2008, p. 25
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54. ↑ HankinsSilverman 1995, p. 95
55. ↑ Mešterová 2006, pp. 128–129
56. ↑ RumanovskýStadtrucker 1961, pp. 24–27
57. ↑ Ullmann 2007, p. 31
58. ↑ Ullmann 2007, p. 31
59. ↑ Germain 1821
60. ↑ RumanovskýStadtrucker 1961, pp. 83–84
61. ↑ Stöckmann 2007, p. 21
62. ↑ Wheatstone 1833
63. ↑ GanderWanner 2012, p. 18
64. ↑ Kirchhoff 1850
65. ↑ GanderWanner 2012, pp. 17–18
66. ↑ Voigt 1893
67. ↑ Strutt (Baron Rayleigh) 1894
68. ↑ GanderWanner 2012, p. 19
69. ↑ Ritz 1909
70. ↑ GanderWanner 2012, pp. 19–28
71. ↑ Stöckmann 2007, p. 21
72. ↑ HankinsSilverman 1995, pp. 130–132
73. ↑ Levin 1990, pp. 38–39
74. ↑ Levin 1990, p. 39
75. ↑ HankinsSilverman 1995, p. 132
76. ↑ Ritter 1810, pp. 227–246
77. ↑ Benjamin 1998, pp. 213–214
78. ↑ HankinsSilverman 1995, p. 132
79. ↑ HankinsSilverman 1995, pp. 132–133
80. ↑ Benjamin 1998, pp. 213–214
81. ↑ Szendy 2008, pp. 22–23
82. ↑ Szendy 2008, pp. 21–22
83. ↑ HankinsSilverman 1995, pp. 145–146
84. ↑ Adorno 1990, pp. 59–60
85. ↑ HankinsSilverman 1995, p. 146
86. ↑ Levin 1990, p. 41
87. ↑ Jenny 2001
88. ↑ Ullmann 2007, pp. 28–29
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89. ↑ Ullmann 2007, p. 29
90. ↑ Ullmann 2007, p. 29
91. ↑ Ullmann 2007, p. 29
92. ↑ Mešterová 2006, pp. 129–130
93. ↑ Ullmann 2007, p. 29
94. ↑ Ullmann 2007, p. 29

Bibliography

Chladni's dissertations
De banno contumaciae, Dissertation, Leipzig, 1781. (Latin)
De charactere ecclesiastico principum, Dissertation, 1782. (Latin)

Entdeckungen über die Theorie

des Klanges, 1787. View online.

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 Die Akustik, 2nd edition, 1830.
View online.

Traité d'acoustique, 1809. View

online.

Works by Chladni on acoustics

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Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges [Discoveries in the
Theory of Sound], Leipzig, 1787, 78 pp. Reprint, Leipzig, 1980.
(German) [61]
"Von dem Euphon, einem neuerfundenen musikalischen
Instrumente", Journal von und für Deutschland, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1790),
pp 201-202. (German)
"Geschichte der Erfindung des Euphons und einiger anderer
akustischer Entdeckungen", Magazin für das Neueste aus der
Physik und Naturgeschichte, Vol. 9, No. 4 (1794), pp 100-116.
(German)
"Nachricht von dem gedanken des Hrn. D. Chladni über den
Ursprung der von Pallas gefundenen und anderer ihr ähnliche,
Eisenmassen nebst einigen damit in Verbindung stehenden
Naturerscheinugen", Magazin für das Neueste aus der Physik und
Naturgeschichte, Vol. 9, No. 4 (1794), pp 116-129. (German)
"Beyträge zur Beförderung eines bessern Vortrages der
Klanglehre", Der Gesellschaft naturforschender Freunde zu Berlin,
Neue Schriften, Vol. 1 (1795), pp 102-124. (German)
"Beobachtungen über die durch Brennen der entzündbaren Luft
in einer Röhre hervorzubringenden Töne", Der Gesellschaft
naturforschender Freunde zu Berlin, Neue Schriften, Vol. 1 (1795), pp
125-130. (German)
Űber die Longitudinalschwingungen der Saiten und Stäbe , Erfurt: G.
A. Keyser, 1796, 14 pp. (German) [62]
"Über drehende Schwingungen eines Stabes", Der Gesellschaft
naturforschender Freunde zu Berlin, Neue Schriften, Vol. 2 (1799), pp
274-277. (German)
Die Akustik, Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1802, 310 pp. Second
edition, 1830. (German) [63]
Traité d'acoustique, Paris: Chez Courcier, 1809. A biographical
preface added. Second edition, 1812. (French) [64] [65]
Neue Beyträge zur Akustik, Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1817.
Reprint, Leipzig, 1980. (German) [66] [67]

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 Beiträge zur praktischen Akustik und zur Lehre vom
Instrumentenbau, enthaltend die Theorie und Anwendung zum Bau
des Clavicylinders und verwandter Instrumente, Leipzig, 1821.
Reprint, Leipzig, 1980. (German)
"E. F. F. Chladni, über sein neues Euphon, und über die Gesetze,
nach welchen sich die Schwingungen in demselben richten",
Annalen der Physik, Vol. 75, No. 9 (1823), pp 69–82. (German)
"Über die Hervorbringung der menschlichen Sprachlaute",
Annalen der Physik, Leipzig, 1824. (German)
"Űber eine verunstaltete Nachricht von der bekannten
Wetterharfe zu Basel", Annalen der Physik, Leipzig, 1825, pp 471–
473. (German) Excerpt.
"Über meine Aufnahme bei Napoleon und sonst in Paris", Cäcilia,
5 (1826), pp 137-144. (German)
Kurze Übersicht der Schall- und Klanglehre, nebst einem Anhange die
Entwickelung und Anordnung der Tonverhältnisse betreffend, Mainz,
1827. (German)
"Autobiographie" (used as Necrologue), Cäcilia, 6 (1827), pp 297-
308. (German)

Works by Chladni on meteoritics

Über den Ursprung der von Pallas gefundenen und anderer ihr
ähnlicher Eisenmassen und über einige damit in Verbindung
stehende Naturerscheinungen [On the Origin of the Pallas Iron and
Others Similar to it, and on Some Associated Natural
Phenomena], Leipzig and Riga, 1794. (German)
Reprinted as Über den kosmischen Ursprung der Meteorite und
Feuerkugeln (1794), with commentary by Gimter Hoppe,
Leipzig: Ostwalds Klassiker der exakten Wissenschaften,
1979. (German)
Über Feuermeteore und die mit denselben herabgefallenen Massen,
Vienna: J. G. Heubner, 1820. (German) [68] [69] [70]

Monographs on Chladni

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Wilhelm Bernhardt, Dr. Ernst
Chladni, der Akustiker. Eine
Biographie und geschichtliche
Darstellung seiner Entdeckungen
zur Erinnerung an seinen
hundertjährigen Geburtstag den 30.
November 1856, Wittenberg:
Franz Mohr, 1856. (German)
Melde, Franz (1866). Ueber
Chladni's Leben und Wirken: nebst
einem chronologischen Verzeichnis
seiner literärischen Arbeiten.
Marburg: C. L. Pfeil. pp. 51
(German). 2nd edition, Marburg: Ivan Rumanovský, Ivan
N.G. Elwert'sche Stadtrucker, E.F.F. Chladný: Otec
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1888, 80 akustiky a meteoritiky, 1961.
(Slovak) Download PDF.
pp.
Rumanovský, Ivan; Stadtrucker,
Ivan (1961). E.F.F. Chladný: Otec
akustiky a meteoritiky. Martin:
Osveta. pp. 141 (Slovak).
Dieter Ullmann, Ernst Florens
Friedrich Chladni, Leipzig: BSB B.
G. Teubner Verlagsgesellschaft,
1983. (German)
Ullmann, Dieter (1996). Chladni
und die Entwicklung der Akustik von
1750-1860. Basel: Birkhäuser.
pp. 237. ISBN 3-7643-5398-8
(German).

Dieter Ullmann, Ernst Florens

Friedrich Chladni, 1983.
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 (German) Download PDF.

Dieter Ullmann, Chladni und die

Entwicklung der Akustik von 1750-
1860, 1996. (German) Download
PDF.

Book chapters, Papers and Articles on Chladni

"On the invention of the euphon, and other acoustic discoveries
of C. F. F. Chladni", Philosophical Magazine Series 1, Vol. 2, No. 8
(1799), pp 391-398. [71]
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1817). "Schicksal der Handschrift". Zur
Morphologie.
Wilhelm Weber, "Lebensbild E. F. F. Chladnis", in Allgemeine
Enzyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, Vol. 21, edited by J. S.
Ersch and J. G. Gruber, Leipzig, 1830. Reprinted in: Wilhelm
Weber, Werke, Vol. 1: Akustik, Mechanik, Optik und Wärmelehre
Berlin, 1892. (German)
Steffens, Henrich (1844). "Die letzten". Was ich erlebte: aus der
Erinnerung niedergeschrieben, Vol. IX. Breslau: Josef Max. pp. 275–
368 (German).
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Eugen von Lommel, "Chladni, Ernst Florenz Friedrich", Allgemeine
Deutsche Biographie, Bd. 4, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1876, pp
124–126.
Marie-Nicolas Bouillet, Alexis Chassang (eds.), "Ernst Chladni", in
Dictionnaire universel d’histoire et de géographie, 1878. (French)
Erich Ebstein, "Aus Chladnis Leben und Wirken", Mitteilungen zur
Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften, 4 (1905), pp
438-460. (German)
K. Locwenfeld, "E. F. F. Chladni. Skizze von Leben und Werk",
Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiet der Naturwissenschaften, 22 (1929),
Naturwiss. Verein Hamburg, pp 117-144. (German)
R. Földes, "Chladni", Výročná správa Československej reálky, Košice,
1931. (Slovak)
R. Földes, "Chladni. Otec akustiky", Časopis pro pěstování
matematiky a fysiky, No. 8, 1931, p 9. (Slovak)
Hans Schimank, "Beiträge Zur Lebensgeschichte von E. F. F.
Chladni", Sudhoffs Archiv für die Geschichte der Medizin und der
Naturwissenschaften, 37 (1953) pp 370-376. (German)
Hans Schimank, "Chladni, Ernst Florenz Friedrich", Neue Deutsche
Biographie, Bd. 3, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1957, p 205. [72]
(German)
Günter Hoppe, "Das Pallas-Eisen, ein Ausgangspunkt fÜr die
Meteoritenrheorie E. F. F. Chladnis (1794)", Zeitschrift fur
geologische Wissenschaften, 4 (1976), Berlin, pp 521-528. (German)
Günter Hoppe, "Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni. Zum 150.
Todestag des Begründers der Meteoritenkunde", Chemie der Erde,
36 (1977), pp 249-262. (German)
Günter Hoppe, "Goethes Ansichten über Meteorite und sein
Verhältnis zu dem Physiker Chladni", Goethe-Jahrbuch, 95 (1978)
pp 227-240. (German)
T. D. Rossing, "Chladni's Law for Vibrating Plates", American
Journal of Physics 50 (1982), pp 271–274.

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Dieter Ullmann, "Chladnis Italienreise nach Briefen von J.P.
Schulthesius", NTM-Schriftenreihe fur Geschichte der
Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin, Vol. 2, No. 19 (1982),
Leipzig, pp 51-57. Correction ibid. No. 20 (1983), p 89. (German)
Dieter Ullmann, "Chladni und die Entwicklung der
experimentellen Akustik um 1800", Archive History Exact Sci. 31
(1984), pp 35-52. (German)
Walther Killy (ed.), Literaturlexikon: Autoren und Werke deutscher
Sprache, Bd. 2, 1988 p 408. (German)
Dieter Ullmann, "Chladni und Ottmer - ein frühes Beispiel für die
Zusammenarbeit von Akustiker und Architekt", Acustica 71, H.1
(1990), pp 58-63. (German)
U.B. Marvin, "Ernst Florenz Friedrich Chladni (1756-1827) and the
origins of modern meteorite research", Meteoritics & Planetary
Science, 31 (1996), pp 545-588.
"Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni (1756–1827) and the origins of
modern meteorite research". Meteoritics 31 (5): 545–588. 1996.
Dieter Ullmann, "Chladnis Beiträge zur Raumakustik", NTM
International Journal of History & Ethics of Natural Sciences,
Technology & Medicine, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Feb 2006), pp 1-8. (German)
Myles W. Jackson, Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and
Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany, MIT Press,
2006.
Mešterová, Jana (2006). "Ernest Florens Fridrich Chladný –
Chladni: Fyzik so slovenskými koreňmi, nazývaný otec akustiky a
meteoritiky". XXIII. Zborník dejín fyziky. Bratislava: Slovenská
spoločnosť pre dejiny vied a techniky pri SAV. pp. 127–132
(Slovak).
Heise, B. (6 2007). "Chladni's clavicylinder and some imitations".
The European Physical Journal Special Topics 145 (1): 3–14.
Stöckmann, Hans-Jürgen (6 2007). "Chladni meets Napoleon". The
European Physical Journal Special Topics 145 (1): 15–23. German
version, 2006.
Ullmann, Dieter (6 2007). "Life and work of E.F.F. Chladni". The
European Physical Journal Special Topics 145 (1): 25–32.
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 J. Biała, "Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni — ojciec akustyki i
meteorytyki", Mat. V Konf. Meteorytowej, Wrocław, 2008. (Polish)
W. Czajka, "Cmentarz Wielki we Wrocławiu - miejsce pochówku
E.F.F. Chladniego", Mat. V Konf. Meteorytowej, Wrocław, 2008.
(Polish)
A. Dobrucki, "Ernst Chladni i początki nowoczesnej akustyki", Mat.
V Konf. Meteorytowej, Wrocław, 2008. (Polish)
Marian Stępniewski, Hubert Sylwestrzak, "Ernst Florens Friedrich
Chladni (1756–1827) — ojciec meteorytyki", Przegląd Geologiczny,
3 (2008). (Polish)
more

On Chladni figures

Ritter, Johann Wilhelm (1810). Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines

jungen Physikers: Ein Taschenbuch fuer Freunde der Natur. 2.
Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer.
Germain, Sophie (1821). Recherches sur la théorie des surfaces
élastiques. Paris: M.V. Courcier.
Ernst Heinrich Weber, Wilhelm Weber, Wellenlehre auf
Experimente gegründet oder über die Wellen tropfbarer Flüssigkeiten
mit Anwendung auf die Schall- und Lichtwellen, Leipzig: Gerhard
Fleischer, 1825. (German) [73]
Wheatstone, Charles (1833). "On the Figures Obtained by
Strewing Sand on Vibrating Surfaces, Commonly Called Acoustic
Figures". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London
(The Royal Society) 123: 593–633.
Higgins, W. Mullinger (1838). The Philosophy of Sound, and History
of Music. London: Wm. S. Orr.
Kirchhoff, G. (1850). "Über das Gleichgewicht und die Bewegung
einer elastischen Scheibe". Journal für die reine und angewandte
Mathematik 1850 (50): 51–88 (German).
Franz Josef Pisko, "Tönende Platten", in Die neueren Apparate der
Akustik. Für Freunde der Naturwissenschaft und der Tonkunst,
Vienna: Carl Gerold's Sohn, 1865, pp 156-169. (German)

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Voigt, W. (1893). "Bemerkung zu dem Problem der transversalen
Schwingungen rechteckiger Platten". Göttingen Nachrichten
(Königl. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften und der Georg-Augusts-
Universität): 225–230 (German).
Strutt (Baron Rayleigh), J. W. (1894). The Theory of Sound, Vol. I (2
ed.). London: Macmillan.
Ritz, Walter (1909). "Theorie der Transversalschwingungen einer
quadratischen Platte mit freien Rändern". Annalen der Physik 333
(4): 737–786 (German).
Adorno, Theodor W. (15 December 1934). "Die Form der
Schallplatte". 23: Eine Wiener Musikzeitschrift (17-19): 35–39
(German).
Adorno, Theodor W. (1990). "The Form of the Phonograph
Record". October (The MIT Press) 55 (Winter): 56–61.
Theodor W. Adorno, Klangfiguren: Musikalische Schriften I,
Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1959. Republished in
Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 16. (German)
Mary Desiree Waller, Chladni Figures: A Study in Symmetry, London:
G. Bell, 1961.
Benjamin, Walter (1998). The Origin of the German Tragic Drama.
Translated by John Osborne. London/New York: Verso. Originally
published in German as Unsprung des deutschen Trauerspiels,
1963.
Levin, Thomas Y. (1990). "For the Record: Adorno on Music in the
Age of Its Technological Reproducibility". October (The MIT Press)
55 (Winter): 23–47.
James F. Bell, "The late-twentieth century resolution of a mid-
nineteenth century dilemma generated by the eighteenth-
century experiments of Ernst Chladni on the dynamics of rods",
Archive for History of Exact Sciences, Vol. 43, No. 3 (1991), pp 251-
273.
Hankins, Thomas Leroy; Silverman, Robert J. (1995). Instruments
and the Imagination. Princeton University Press. pp. 337.
Jenny, Hans (2001). Cymatics: A Study of Wave Phenomena and
Vibration.
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 Jackson, Myles W. (2006). "E. F. F. Chladni: The Nodal Point
between Acoustician and Musical-Instrument Maker".
Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in
Nineteenth-Century Germany. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
pp. 13–44.
Miroslav Tibor Morovics, "Chladniho obrazce v Antolikovom
podaní", in XXIII. Zborník dejín fyziky, Bratislava: Slovenská
spoločnosť pre dejiny vied a techniky pri SAV, 2006, pp 133–140.
(Slovak)
Courtial, J.; O'Holleran, K. (6 2007). "Experiments with twisted
light". The European Physical Journal Special Topics 145 (1): 35–47.
Gough, Colin (6 2007). "The violin: Chladni patterns, plates, shells
and sounds". The European Physical Journal Special Topics 145 (1):
77–101.
Brüning, J. (6 2007). "Nodal sets in mathematical physics". The
European Physical Journal Special Topics 145 (1): 181–189.
Gnutzmann, S.; Karageorge, P.; Smilansky, U. (6 2007). " A trace
formula for the nodal count sequence". The European Physical
Journal Special Topics 145 (1): 217–229.
Libisch, F.; Rotter, S.; Burgdörfer, J. (6 2007). "Chladni figures in
Andreev billiards". The European Physical Journal Special Topics 145
(1): 245–254.
Szendy, Peter (2008). "Klangfiguren (a hit in the lab)". In Kursell,
Julia. Sounds of Science – Schall im Labor (1800–1930). Max Planck
Institute for the History of Science. pp. 21–27.
Gander, Martin J.; Wanner, Gerhard (2012). " From Euler, Ritz, and
Galerkin to Modern Computing". SIAM Review (Society for
Industrial and Applied Mathematics) 54 (4).

Links

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