Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni (1756-1827) was a significant figure in the fields of acoustics and astronomy. He combined, like many representatives of Romanticism in science, interests in the practical and the theoretical. Chladni drew inspiration and insights from multiple fields of study, including music, physics, chemistry, literature, and natural history. In this respect he was emblematic of the Romantic quest for a unified body of knowledge that would heal the divisions between the disciplines. At the same time Romantics hoped to overcome the alienation of humans from nature, which they traced to the Enlightenment tendency to break things up into their component parts.
Romantic scientists were particularly driven by the desire to merge the sciences and the arts. Novalis spoke of the need for a "poeticization of the sciences" and figures like Goethe combined great accomplishment in the arts with serious (if not entirely successful) contributions to science. Romantics sought to explain the world better through metaphors that captured experience from as universal a perspective as possible. In pursuit of this end they cultivated wide social and intellectual circles, maximizing their influences from across the arts and sciences.
Chladni was the first scientist to argue, in a book published in 1794, that meteorites had a cosmic origin. Most scientists, including Aristotle and Newton, previously believed their origins were terrestrial, in lightning or volcanos. Chladni collected eyewitness accounts of fireballs and determined that the speed of the rocks' movement through the atmosphere could not be ascribed to gravity alone. During these investigations he assembled the largest collection of meteorites in private hands, bequeathed at his death to the Natural History Museum at Berlin's Humboldt University.
In acoustics, he was best known for a series of experiments that created visual representations of sound wave patterns in solid plates. By scattering dust over the plates, Chladni generated a vast array of different configurations as he varied the shape of the plates and the manner in which they were vibrated.
He also calculated the rate at which sound waves vibrate in various fixed substances (zinc, silver, copper, iron, glass, etc.) He noted that many of these materials conduct sound much more quickly than air. He explored the vibration of sound waves both across the length of a rod and around its longitudinal axis. In 1802 he published a textbook summarizing the current understanding of acoustics.
He also invented two musical instruments, which he carried around Europe and demonstrated to far-flung audiences. The euphonium (1790) added a keyboard to the glass harmonica, which created tones by rubbing glass jars (Benjamin Franklin famously invented a version of the glass harmonica). Later Chladni developed the Clavicylinder as well. After inventing the euphonium, Chladni began a peripatetic life touring Europe, lecturing on acoustics and demonstrating his inventions. His wandering life brought him into contact with a remarkably wide range of scholars and artists from an equally wide range of disciplines.
Acquisition History (by Paul Merchant)
The desire to be remembered is a common human ambition. Almost every culture has some form of commemoration of the dead: in obituaries, grave goods, or ancestor worship. A very special case is the preservation of relics from Christ's Passion: multiple fragments of the True Cross, or the Crown of Thorns in Paris and the Shroud in Turin. To give more local examples, this college's archives already contain C. E. S. Wood's carefully preserved correspondence, William Stafford's orderly files of daily writings, and complete sets of poem drafts by Vern Rutsala and Paulann Petersen. Individuals leave behind records of their creative thought in a wide variety of fields: in paintings, sculptures, books, handwritten journals, architectural designs and civic planning and in formal gardens, in exploration and the history of scientific discovery. Less attractively, individuals have entered history through military adventures, as dictators, and by theft on a national scale. All of us, great and small, leave our mark.
It was with these thoughts in mind that I began collecting the relics of a German physicist who died in Breslau in 1827. When in 1985 I made the first of a half dozen teaching exchange visits to the town (now the southern Polish city of Wrocław) I had been made aware of E. F. F. Chladni's presence in the city at the end of his life, though a British Museum catalogue, Printing and the Mind of Man, which listed his first volume on Acoustics (1802) as a significant text in the history of print, the first systematic account of this new field of science. I was also aware that he was unusual in being a pioneer in another quite separate scientific discipline, the study of meteorites. It was only after I had been taken to the house where he ate his last meal that I learned of his unusual death, which was a nine days' wonder in Breslau in April 1827.
Historical curiosity can easily become an obsession. In the three decades since that first visit, I have been able to identify material examples of his scientific studies in various museums: his purpose-built clavicylinder (keyboard glass harmonica), now in Leipzig, on which he performed for Napoleon, and his collection of meteorites, now divided between Berlin and Vienna. And over the years I have been able to purchase three handwritten letters, one by Chladni himself, one by Johann Theodor Mosewius, the last person to see him alive, and the third by Ernst Heinrich Weber, his longtime friend and first biographer. Other prized relics that came my way are the French translation in 1809 of his key volume on acoustics, as well as an 1817 expansion of the same research, and a rare survival, a pamphlet announcing one of Chladni's lectures in Brussels in the 1820s. Other physical remnants are volumes by Henrik Steffens, the host of his last evening, by the novelist August Apel, his host in Leipzig, and by the Count Nuvolone, his host in Turin. Finally, Chladni's world can be further expanded by engraved pages from works by his scientific friends: from Bode's Celestial Atlas and from Lacépède's Natural History of Fish. All these items are described more fully in the finding aid at the close of this account.
In addition to the physical remnants, we are able of course to follow traces of Chladni through historical documents. From Chladni's own surviving letters and other documents we can compile a partial list of his travels between the many scientific societies of Europe: Wittenberg, Grimma, Leipzig, Dresden, Berlin, Göttingen, Bremen, Hamburg, Petersburg, Flensburg, Danzig, Königsberg, Copenhagen, Leipzig, Riga, Petersburg, Tallinn, Erfurt, Dresden, Copenhagen, Prague, Munich, Vienna, Göttingen, Leipzig, Weimar, Salzburg, Vienna, Pressburg, Ofen, Turin, Brunn, Prague, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Strassburg, Geneva, Basel, Zurich, Turin, Milan, Bologna, Florence, Padua, Venice, Munich, Vienna, Karlsbad, Wittenberg, Kemberg, Weimar, Göttingen, Bremen, Vienna, Leipzig, Halle, Berlin, Leipzig, Hamburg, Bremen, Munster, Cologne, Bonn, Munich, Dresden, Vienna, Bremen, Göttingen, Frankfurt, Bonn, Leipzig, Berlin, and his last destination, Breslau.
Then we find him present in the letters of Goethe and Schiller, and of the twelve-year old Mendelssohn, and in the prose of two witty storytellers, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. There is the Emperor Napoleon's much-quoted comment after their meeting that "Chladni has made sound visible." And finally, in the autobiography of Henrik Steffens we have a detailed account of the meal in April 1827 at which Chladni described a perfect death, on the very night when (as befits a physicist) he accidentally timed his own last moment on earth.
Driven to become an academic lawyer by his tyrannical father, Chladni struck out after his father's death on his own eccentric and utterly original path. Apparently modest and unassuming in life, he created two new fields of science in a great age of discovery, and the objects in the college's Chladni collection provide distant echoes of a vivid life of two centuries ago.
The collection consists of books, manuscript letters, printed articles, meteorites, images and plates.
Collection is open for research.
Chladni's work on meteorites was stimulated by the observation by the astronomers Johann Bode and Johann Titius of an apparent a gap between Mars and Jupiter. Based on the geometrical distances between the other known planets we would expect to find another planet at that distance from the sun. Chladni took this as evidence that meteorites might have their origin in metal and rock from this unformed planet. Later astronomers would locate the asteroid belt in just this area between Mars and Jupiter.
One of Chladni's very numerous scholarly articles on the subjects of meteorites.
Two examples of iron meteorites, typical of those in Chladni's collection. Tektites are small glassy objects resulting from asteroid impacts with the earth, cooling from molten glass to a solid before falling back to earth. Moldavites are a specialized form of green glass tektite, formed from the impact of a giant meteorite that caused the Nördlinger Ries crater in Bavaria. Almost all moldavites have been found in southern Bohemia.
An extremely rare survival, this announcement of one of Chladni's numerous public lectures would normally have been thrown away at the time of the lecture.
From the end of 1808 to April 1810 Chladni was in Paris, where he learned that Napoleon I had expressed an interest in meeting him. In February 1809 he was invited to the Tuileries, where he demonstrated his instruments to Napoleon and performed acoustical experiments. Napoleon urged Chladni to have his textbook on acoustics translated into French; the following day he supplied 6000 francs to this end. Chaldni dedicated the book to Napoleon when it appeared in November.
Chladni's final researches on acoustics, extending the material in his 1787 masterwork in German, Die Akustik. One of many editions of these volumes.
An account of Chladni's researches published in a French journal, illustrating his reputation in the mid-nineteenth century.
In the latter part of the century, images of Chladni's signature experiments, now almost commonplace.
Chladni designed two types of instrument based on the principle of the glass harmonica: the Euphon, in which glass rods are stroked to produce a scale of notes, and the Clavicylinder, in which nested glass bowls are revolved in water by a foot pedal, and the notes sounded by pads lowered on the glasses by keys in a conventional clavichord keyboard. These pads take the place of moistened fingers that sound the notes in a more traditional glass harmonica familiar to Mozart, who composed for it, and Benjamin Franklin, who developed his own version in Philadelphia. This clavicylinder was built in Turin by Louis Concone, while Chladni was in residence in the city, at the home of the Conte Nuvolone Pergamo (see items C1 and C2). The line drawing was made by Steve Tilden for Bread & Caviar, 2016 (item D17).
In 1810-1811 Chladni spent six months at the home of Count Giuseppe Nuvolone Pergamo di Scandaluzza, the deputy president of the Royal Agrarian Society of Turin. The Count was a serious scholar of northern Italian agricultural practice. He is now best known for having published the first ampelography of Italian wine: Sulla coltivazione delle viti et sui metodo migliore di fare e conservare i vini. (Calendario della Società Agrario di Torino, 1798). His other publications include research on the cultivation of hemp (1788), of cotton, the volume in our collection (1808), and an overview of Piedmontese agrcultural practice in French: Sur le progres de l'agriculture et de l'industrie en Piemont (Turin, 1804).
Some two dozen of Chladni's letters still survive. This letter was written to an unknown professor in Padua after Chladni's six-month residence with Count Nuvolone Pergamo in Turin. It enclosed some seeds for the professor from the Count, which Chladni is mailing to him since he will probably not be visiting Padua this year (though he seems after all to have done so). The watermark of this 1811 letter (a cherub displaying a banner with the Latin motto TO PARADISE) is identical, apart from the motto, with watermarks in paper used by Thomas Jefferson between 1802 and 1811. The countermark in one of the Jefferson sheets (GM, with a fleur-de-lis) makes it almost certain that the papermaker was Giorgio Magnani of Cartiera Magnani in Brescia, a firm founded in 14104 and still an important mill. Jefferson may have purchased hsi stock during his stay in Paris; Chladni could have found Magnani paper in Italy, Paris, or almost anywhere in Europe.
Johann August Apel was a short story writer who Chladni met at the university in Wittenberg. Later he was a guest at Apel's home in Leipzig in 1815. Apel's story "Der Freischütz" was the basis of the Carl Maria von Weber opera of 1821. In a French translation it also inspired Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
This study of two kinds of northern Italian crop, published in Lucca, was plagiarized from earlier research on these topics, perhaps that of the Count Nuvolone in Turin.
This letter from Leipzig, to Weber's publisher Leopold Voss in the same city, apologizes for the late delivery of two book manuscripts and expresses confidence that he and the publisher will have no difficulty in agreeing to a contract. The Weber brothers (Ernst, Wilhelm and Eduard) grew up in Wittenberg, where their father was a Professor of Dogmatics. They lived in the same house as Chladni, who stimulated in them a love of science. Each of them became distinguished scientists in their own right whose research advanced some of Chladni's central themes and interests. Ernst Weber made significant contributions to the physiology of the senses and helped found the field of psychophysics. He was also Chladni's first biographer. He made the first study of the perception of two close touches on various parts of the body (see E.H. Weber on the Tactile Senses (1996)). When Keats met Coleridge on Hampstead Heath in 1819, one of the topics of the older poet's monologue (along with nightingales, dreams, nightmares, the Kraken, mermaids, and ghost stories) was a theory about "single and double touch." In this Coleridge was surely echoing Weber's researches, perhaps relayed from Chladni through their joint acquaintance Lichtenberg at Göttingen. Wilhelm Weber was a physicist who derived a law of electric force and studied water and sound waves. The unit of magnetic flux (Wb) was named after him. Eduard was a physiologist at the University of Leipzig who studied human locomotion with his brother Wilhelm. He also collaborated with Ernst o the study of waves of sound, light, and liquid, after Chladni's work, resulting in the first account of hydrodynamics in the circulation of the blood. In 1825 the three brothers collaborated on a publication establishing the basic laws of hydrodynamics, which they dedicated to Chladni.
A view of Breslau from the east, published soon after Chladni's death in the city. The cathedral is to the right, on the north bank of the Oder. The University and the Dom Steffensa (the Steffens house) where Chladni spent his last evening, are in the center on the south bank, behind trees, with beyond them (to the right of the trees) the pointed spire of the Nikolaikirche, to the west of the old town, where Chladni was buried; the towers of the medieval old town are to the left of the engraving.
The Count de Lacépède, like Chladni a fine amateur musician, was famed as a zoologist who completed Buffon's Natural History. He was present at Chladni's meeting with Napoleon in February 1809.
Johann Theodor Mosewius (1788-1858) was a singer and music director. He directed the Königsberg Opera under August von Kotzebue from 1814, and in 1816 moved to Breslau, where he founded the Singakademie and taught music at the university. Later in life he published studies of Bach's work. He took Chladni home from Steffens' house on the last night of his life. This letter, addressed to the operatic singer Mathilde Hellwig, begins with sympathy with her over an illness. On 4 June 1828, in a letter enclosed in correspondence with their mutual friend Franz von Schober, Mosewius had assured Schubert of his admiration for his songs, including perhaps the first independent praise of Winterreise.
James Davenport Whelpley (1817-1872), a noted polemicist on immigration and other subjects, was one of the owners of the American Whig Review, which published poems and stories by Edgar Allen Poe. Whelpley himself wrote stories with a supernatural or science fiction slant; in this example a jealous husband uses a listening device based on Chladni's researches to spy on his wife.
In 1827, at the age of 76, Chladni came to Breslau, where he attracted a circle of admirers and was a prominent part of the local social life. One of his friends was Henrik Steffens (1773-1845), a professor at the University of Breslau from 1811 to 1832. Steffens was a philosopher who promoted the Naturphilosophie of Friedrich Schelling. He was influenced by his study of geology, and promoted the doctrine of "Individualization," according to which organisms become more distinct the higher on an evolutionary scale they appear.