Vibratory pseudoscience exploited Chladni patterns to defraud millions.

Evidence

At the end of the nineteenth century, crackpots and charlatans such as John Worrel Keely made vague appeals to the vibratory universe and cited Chladni patterns as a way to tap into hidden powers. Millions of dollars were lost by gullible investors. After his death, Keely’s magical energy machines, witnessed by hundreds over the years supposedly channeling vibrations of some vague sort, were found to be powered by a more prosaic source of compressed air in his basement. A quick check of the Internet reveals that vibratory pseudoscience, much of it traceable back to Chladni, is alive and well. Chladni, if he was aware of such reactions, certainly did nothing on record to encourage them. He was a serious if unconventional scientist. — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 1385

Categorization

• SEED: Angle on how legitimate scientific visualization gets co-opted by pseudoscience — the Keely compressed-air fraud as a case study in credulity and ‘vibrational’ woo.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how sound/silence claims get mystified — parallels to modern cymatics-inflected New Age content.