Who was Ernst Chladni?
Ernst Chladni was a German physicist who, in 1794, argued that meteorites and fireballs come from space, an idea that many scientists then rejected.
Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni (1756 to 1827) was a German physicist and musician, best known for his work on sound. He discovered that sand sprinkled on a vibrating plate forms beautiful patterns, still called Chladni figures.
Meteorites. In 1794, Chladni published a short book arguing that fireballs and stones and irons that fall from the sky are real and come from space. At the time, most scientists thought stories of falling stones were superstition, or that the stones were ordinary rocks struck by lightning or thrown out of volcanoes.
His evidence. Chladni collected many eyewitness reports of falls from history and from different countries, showing consistent features: bright fireballs, explosions and hot stones. He studied large iron masses, such as the Pallas iron from Siberia, and argued that they could not have formed on Earth. He suggested they were leftover material from space or fragments of broken worlds.
Reaction. Many scientists mocked his ideas. But within a few years, several well-documented falls, including Wold Cottage in Yorkshire in 1795 and L'Aigle in France in 1803, together with chemical analyses by Edward Howard, provided strong support.
Legacy. Chladni is often called the father of meteoritics. He built one of the early meteorite collections, and continued to write about meteorites. His willingness to take eyewitness reports seriously, and to collect and compare evidence, helped establish meteoritics as a science.