Home in Wittenberg
Chladni was born and grew up in Wittenberg, Germany, and returned there periodically throughout his adult life. Wittenberg, the town of the university known for its connection to Martin Luther, became a setting for Chladni's association with a number of prominent intellectuals who shaped his career, and vice versa.
Among these intellectuals were the Weber brothers, whose father taught at the University as a Professor of Dogmatics. Ernst, Wilhelm, and Eduard lived in the same house as Chladni, who stimulated in them a love of science. Each of them became distinguished scientists in their own right whose research advanced some of Chladni’s central themes and interests. Ernst Weber made significant contributions to the physiology of the senses and helped found the field of psychophysics. He was also Chladni’s first biographer. Wilhelm Weber was a physicist who derived a law of electric force and studied water and sound waves. The unit of magnetic flux (Wb) was named after him. Eduard was a physiologist at the University of Leipzig who studied human locomotion with his brother Wilhelm. In 1825 the three brothers collaborated on a publication establishing the basic laws of hydrodynamics, which they dedicated to Chladni.
Another of these was Johann August Apel, a short story writer. Chladni met Apel at the university in Wittenberg. Later he was a guest at Apel’s home in Leipzig in 1815. Apel’s story “Der Freischütz” was the basis of the Carl Maria von Weber opera of 1821, and in a French translation also inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.