ABSTRACT
Having performed Chladni’s acoustic plates as both private inquiry and popular exhibition for well over a decade, Wheatstone finally wrote up an extensive account of these experiments in 1833. Like Faraday’s work on vibrating fluids, or “crispations”, Wheatstone published his study of acoustic figures in the country’s most eminent scientific journal, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Although he continued to manage his family’s commercial operations, designing and building a series of financially lucrative instruments, notably his Concertina and Symphonium, Wheatstone’s main line of experimental inquiry would turn ever more to electromagnetic phenomena and the development of telegraphic apparatus. In all the modes of vibration of a square or rectangular plate, the figures, even if they consist of diagonal or tortuous lines, may all be referred to a certain number of nodal lines in the two directions parallel to the sides.
