25 Facts About Ernst Chladni

Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni was a German physicist and musician.

Ernst Chladni undertook pioneering work in the study of meteorites and is regarded by some as the father of meteoritics.

Ernst Chladni has therefore been identified as German, Hungarian and Slovak.

Ernst Chladni came from an educated family of academics and learned men.

Ernst Chladni's grandfather, Martin Ernst Chladni, was a Lutheran theologian and, in 1710, became professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg.

Ernst Chladni's uncle, Justus Georg Ernst Chladni, was a law professor at the university.

Chladni's father, Ernst Martin Chladni, was a law professor and rector of the University of Wittenberg.

Ernst Chladni had joined the law faculty there in 1746.

Ernst Chladni's mother was Johanna Sophia and he was an only child.

Ernst Chladni's father disapproved of his son's interest in science and insisted that Chladni would become a lawyer.

Ernst Chladni studied law and philosophy in Wittenberg and Leipzig, obtaining a law degree from the University of Leipzig in 1782.

Ernst Chladni gave lectures on law, mathematics, and natural sciences at the University of Wittenberg from 1783 to 1792.

Ernst Chladni had visited the Paris Academy in 1808 and had demonstrated the vibration patterns before an audience that included not only the leading French scientists but Napoleon himself; Napoleon set a prize for the best mathematical explanation.

In quantum mechanics, Ernst Chladni figures are known to be related to the solutions of the Schrodinger equation for one-electron atoms, and the mathematics describing them was used by Erwin Schrodinger to arrive at the understanding of electron orbitals.

In 1791, Ernst Chladni invented the musical instrument called the euphon, consisting of glass rods of different pitches.

Ernst Chladni's euphon is the direct ancestor of the modern day musical instrument known as the Cristal Baschet.

Ernst Chladni improved on Hooke's "musical cylinder" to produce another instrument, the clavicylinder, in 1799.

Ernst Chladni argued that this would explain the high speeds of the falling masses as well as linking the masses to the fireballs; they glow intensely bright as they enter the Earth's atmosphere.

Ernst Chladni hypothesized that these meteorites were chunks of material that had either never been consolidated in the formation of larger masses or were debris from the formation and destruction of planets.

Ernst Chladni's book was initially ridiculed by contemporary physicists, including Lichtenberg.

Ernst Chladni's insights have led some in the field to call him the "father of meteoritics" while others have been more conservative with their appraisal of Ernst Chladni's contributions to the field.

Ernst Chladni continued to develop his record of meteorite sightings throughout the next several decades as well as amassing a collection of meteorite samples.

Ernst Chladni donated this collection to the Mineralogical Museum of Berlin University in 1827 and it now resides in the Museum of Natural History at Humboldt University of Berlin.

Ernst Chladni discovered Ernst Chladni's law, a simple algebraic relation for approximating the modal frequencies of the free oscillations of plates and other bodies.

Ernst Chladni estimated sound velocities in different gases by placing those gases in an organ pipe and measuring the characteristics of the sounds that emerged when the pipe was played.