Ernst Chladni
The physicist who argued in 1794 that stones and lumps of iron really do fall from space, when almost no scientist believed it.
Key facts
- Born
- 1756
- Died
- 1827
- Nationality
- German
- Field
- Physicist
Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni was born in Wittenberg in Saxony and trained in law before turning to science. He became famous for acoustics: he scattered sand on metal plates, drew a violin bow along the edge, and showed the beautiful patterns that vibrations make. These Chladni figures are still demonstrated in physics lessons today.
His second great idea was about the sky. In 1794 he published a short book on the huge mass of iron and olivine that the naturalist Peter Simon Pallas had seen in Siberia. Chladni gathered dozens of old reports of fireballs and falling stones, compared them, and drew a bold conclusion: fireballs were solid bodies arriving from space at great speed, heated to glowing by the air, and the stones and irons found after them were the pieces that reached the ground.
At the time, most scholars thought such reports were superstition, or that the stones had been struck by lightning. Chladni was mocked. Yet within a few years a run of well-witnessed falls, at Siena in 1794, Wold Cottage in 1795 and above all L'Aigle in 1803, proved him right.
Chladni spent the rest of his life collecting meteorites and records of falls, travelling widely to lecture on sound and to visit collections. In 1819 he published a full catalogue of known falls. Because his book was the first serious scientific case for rocks from space, he is often called the father of meteoritics.
Did you know?
Chladni earned much of his living by touring Europe with musical instruments he invented, including one called the euphon.
His 1794 book appeared only two months before a shower of stones fell near Siena in Italy.
On the timeline
See more
The L'Aigle meteoriteThe Wold Cottage meteoriteKrasnojarsk in the catalogue