Ernst Chladni

Ernst Chladni was a German physicist and musician, born in Wittenberg in 1756 and often called the father of acoustics. He studied law and philosophy at Wittenberg and Leipzig, but after his father died in 1782 he turned to physics and began experiments on sound. He is best known for Chladni figures, the patterns that appear when a metal plate lightly covered with sand is bowed to resonance and the sand gathers along the nodal lines, first published in his 1787 book on the theory of sound, and for calculating the speed of sound in different gases. In 1791 he invented the euphon, and he did pioneering work on meteorites, regarded by some as making him the father of meteoritics. His family came from Kremnica, and he has been identified as German, Hungarian and Slovak.