Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni (1756-1827) was a significant figure in the fields of acoustics and astronomy. He combined, like many representatives of Romanticism in science, interests in the practical and the theoretical. Chladni drew inspiration and insights from multiple fields of study, including music, physics, chemistry, literature, and natural history. In this respect he was emblematic of the Romantic quest for a unified body of knowledge that would heal the divisions between the disciplines. At the same time Romantics hoped to overcome the alienation of humans from nature, which they traced to the Enlightenment tendency to break things up into their component parts.

Romantic scientists were particularly driven by the desire to merge the sciences and the arts. Novalis spoke of the need for a “poeticization of the sciences” and figures like Goethe combined great accomplishment in the arts with serious (if not entirely successful) contributions to science. Romantics sought to explain the world better through metaphors that captured experience from as universal a perspective as possible. In pursuit of this end they cultivated wide social and intellectual circles, maximizing their influences from across the arts and sciences.

Chladni was the first scientist to argue, in a book published in 1794, that meteorites had a cosmic origin. Most scientists, including Aristotle and Newton, previously believed their origins were terrestrial, in lightning or volcanos. Chladni collected eyewitness accounts of fireballs and determined that the speed of the rocks’ movement through the atmosphere could not be ascribed to gravity alone. During these investigations he assembled the largest collection of meteorites in private hands, bequeathed at his death to the Natural History Museum at Berlin's Humboldt University.

In acoustics, he was best known for a series of experiments that created visual representations of sound wave patterns in solid plates. By scattering dust over the plates, Chladni generated a vast array of different configurations as he varied the shape of the plates and the manner in which they were vibrated.

He also calculated the rate at which sound waves vibrate in various fixed substances (zinc, silver, copper, iron, glass, etc.) He noted that many of these materials conduct sound much more quickly than air. He explored the vibration of sound waves both across the length of a rod and around its longitudinal axis. In 1802 he published a textbook summarizing the current understanding of acoustics.

He also invented two musical instruments, which he carried around Europe and demonstrated to far-flung audiences. The euphonium (1790) added a keyboard to the glass harmonica, which created tones by rubbing glass jars (Benjamin Franklin famously invented a version of the glass harmonica). Later Chladni developed the Clavicylinder as well. After inventing the euphonium, Chladni began a peripatetic life touring Europe, lecturing on acoustics and demonstrating his inventions. His wandering life brought him into contact with a remarkably wide range of scholars and artists from an equally wide range of disciplines.