His most important work, for which he is sometimes labeled the father of acoustics, included research on vibrating plates and the calculation of the speed of sound for different gases.

[2] Although Chladni was born in Wittenberg in Saxony, his family originated from Kremnica, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary and today a mining town in central Slovakia.

Chladni repeated the pioneering experiments of Robert Hooke who, on 8 July, 1680, had observed the nodal patterns associated with the vibrations of glass plates.

Since the 20th century, it has become more common to place a loudspeaker driven by an electronic signal generator over or under the plate to achieve a more accurate adjustable frequency.

[14] Since at least 1738, a musical instrument called a Glasspiel or verrillon, created by filling beer glasses with varying amounts of water, was popular in Europe.

[15] The beer glasses were struck by wooden mallets shaped like spoons to produce "church and other solemn music".

[16] Benjamin Franklin was sufficiently impressed by a verrillon performance on a visit to London in 1757 that he created his own instrument, the glass armonica, in 1762.

[18] This led him to publish Über den Ursprung der von Pallas gefundenen und anderer ihr ähnlicher Eisenmassen und über einige damit in Verbindung stehende Naturerscheinungen ("On the Origin of the Iron Masses Found by Pallas and Others Similar to it, and on Some Associated Natural Phenomena") in 1794.

Indeed, this supposed emptiness of space had fascinated Chladni as a child when he learned about the relatively large distance between Mars and Jupiter, where the Asteroid Belt is now known to exist.

[23] Although that event had been attributed to an eruption of Mount Vesuvius a few hundred kilometers away, no similar volcanoes exists within the same range of Wold Newton, with the closest being Hekla in Iceland.

[22][23] In 1803, the physicist and astronomer Jean Baptiste Biot was commissioned by the French Minister of the Interior to investigate a meteor shower over L'Aigle in northern France that had peppered the town with thousands of meteorite fragments.

[26][27] A mineral, first described in 1993 from the Carlton (IIICD) iron meteorite, was named chladniite [ca; eu; pl] in his honor.

[citation needed] Chladni died on 3 April 1827, in Breslau, Lower Silesia, then part of the Kingdom of Prussia and today the city of Wrocław in southwestern Poland.