Chladni's influence extended to Johann Wilhelm Ritter, who in 1801 discovered ultraviolet rays and in 1803 the polarization of electrodes in batteries. "It would be beautiful if what became externally clear here were also exactly what the sound pattern is for us inwardly: a light pattern, fire-writing," Ritter observed of Chladni's figures. "Every sound would then have its own letter directly to hand." Ritter's own avowed aim was "to rediscover, or else to find the primeval or natural script by means of electricity." Ritter was a major figure for Walter Benjamin (disclosing to him "what romantic esotericism is all about"), prompting the speculation that "written language grows out of music and not directly from the sounds of the spoken word." Much under the sway of the Kabbalah and the Pythagorean doctrine of cosmic harmony as transmitted through Hermetic lore, Benjamin envisions the word as a trace of primal pulsation (not unlike the hieroglyphic suggestiveness of the Chladni figures.):
One is tempted to say that the very fact that [words] still have a meaning in their isolation lends a threatening quality to this remnant of meaning they have kept. In this way language is broken up so as to acquire a changed and intensified meaning in its fragments. With the baroque the place of the capital letter was established in German orthography. It is not only the aspiration to pomp, but at the same time the disjunctive, atomizing principle of the allegorical approach which is asserted here. In its individual parts fragmented language has ceased merely to serve the process of communication, and as a new-born object acquires a dignity equal to that of gods, rivers, virtues and similar natural forms which fuse into the allegorical. In 1928 Benjamin's friend Theodor Adorno, adressing the musical implications of mechanical piano scrolls, recalled Ritter's reference to Chladni's figures as "the script-like Ur-images of sound," adding that "recent technological development has, in any case, continued what was begun there: the possibility of inscribing music without it ever having sounded has simultaneously reified it in an ever more inhuman manner and also brought it mysteriously closer to the character of writing and language."
From _Imagining Language_ by Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery P. 477
