Thomas Young ’ s translation of sound into light provided a crucial example for parallel
work connecting sound with electricity and magnetism that emerged in the decades just
before and after him. The early connection that Georg Christoph Lichtenberg made
between electricity and its visual trace led directly to Ernst Chladni ’ s vibrating plates,
which gave visual form to sound. F é lix Savart continued the exploration of the electricity –
sound connection, as did Hans Christian Ø rsted and Johann Wilhelm Ritter in their own
ways. In all these cases, sound represented a parallel venue for ideas and experimental
approaches that contributed to the Biot – Savart law of magnetic action and to Ø rsted ’ s
discovery of what he called electromagnetism. The complex interweaving of these studies
of sound, light, electricity, and magnetism aptly reflects the traveling vibrations they all
pursued.
Earliest in this network is Lichtenberg, a remarkable polymath, writer, and wit, and a
friend of Goethe and Kant, whose aphorisms have resonated for generations in the Ger-
man-speaking world. The first professor of experimental physics in a German university,
whom we have already met as Young ’ s teacher, Lichtenberg was active in geodesy, volca-
nology, meteorology, astronomy, and mathematics, to name only a few of his endeavors.
These manifold topics, though, he understood as part of a search for Ganzheit , the whole-
ness and integrated unity of nature: “ There is only one natural science before God; man
makes isolated chapters out of it, and must make them, in accordance with his limitations.
As long as the chapters do not fit together, an error lurks hidden somewhere, in the dif-
ferent chapters separately, or in all of them. ”^1 This quest for the unity of nature character-
ized German Naturphilosophie as a whole, though Lichtenberg stood apart from many of
its more visionary adherents in his hard-headed empirical and experimental orientation.
For him, “ unity ” was a watchword for tough-minded science, not a mystic slogan.
In that spirit, music and sound take their place among many other significant fragments
of the great whole. Convinced that “ everything is in everything, ” Lichtenberg sought con-
nections between magnetism and electricity, magnetism and light, light and heat, heat and
sound — for instance: “ Has one ever produced heat through sound? ”^2 “ Does music make
plants grow, or are there among the plants some that are musical? ”^3 His most famous
barré
(Barré)
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