188 Chapter 12
different species of matter. Yet the unitive spirit of Naturphilosophie led Ø rsted to
hypothesize that they were, in fact, connected. In the course of his attempts to demon-
strate this decisively, Ø rsted began to work with Chladni ’ s acoustic figures. In an 1804
letter to his friend and fellow Naturphilosoph Johann Wilhelm Ritter in Jena, Ø rsted
expresses his view that Chladni ’ s figures not only “ may offer important insights into the
theory of sound ” but could offer the hope of discovering “ electric phenomena in the
production of the acoustic figures. ” Thus, the impulse that came from Lichtenberg ’ s
figures recording electricity subsequently shaped Chladni ’ s acoustic figures, then circled
back to influence Ø rsted ’ s work on electricity. To implement his plan, Ø rsted (like Lich-
tenberg before him) used fine lycopodium power, more responsive to electric charge than
the sand or rosin dust Chladni had used. Ø rsted observed that “ a number of small waves
or nodal points developed with each stroke of the violin bow ” applied to this electrified
Chladni setup, so that “ each acoustic oscillation is composed of a number of smaller
ones. ” Thus, “ each tone in itself would be an organization of oscillations just as any
music is an oscillation of tones, ” thereby unifying the structure of music with the physical
structure of sound in general.^10
The following year (1805), Ø rsted continued his train of thought in a letter to Marc
Auguste Pictet in Geneva, which, like his letter to Ritter, was published and thus shared
more widely. Ø rsted observed the fine detail of the motion of his tiny piles of lycopodium
powder as they moved on the vibrating plate, giving a dynamic quality to the movements
underlying the formation of the visible patterns and the concomitant sound. He then
directed attention to the friction involved in these processes, which “ produces not only
heat but electricity. ” Using Coulomb ’ s electrometer, Ø rsted reports his tentative finding of
electric charge “ on the edges and corners ” of his vibrating bodies, which he proposes to
investigate further.
At this point, Ø rsted involves the work of his friend Ritter, surely the most “ Romantic ”
of the Naturphilosophen : pursuing their common search to unveil the unity of Nature
( Einheit der Natur ), Ritter took this quest to extremes that tested the limits of that unity
and even of his own safety.^11 His boldness and radical imagination clearly fascinated his
friends, who included Goethe, Alexander von Humboldt, and the poets Novalis (Friedrich
von Hardenberg) and Clemens Brentano, as well as Ø rsted. For instance, Ritter applied
the principle of the unity of nature to argue that, corresponding to the “ heat rays ” (infrared
radiation) just discovered by William Herschel (1800), by symmetry there should be
cooling “ chemical rays ” at the opposite end of the spectrum (ultraviolet). In 1801 (the year
he met Ø rsted), Ritter showed that these rays darkened silver chloride. In 1800, using the
new voltaic pile Ritter had independently discovered the electrical decomposition of water,
which he again had deduced from the implications of Naturphilosophie for the interrelation
between positive and negative electricity. At the time, he was twenty-four, a dropout from
medical school, basically self-taught as a scientist. Not all his deductions about the unity
of Nature were confirmed by others, such as his claim that the Earth had electric (as well