Heinrich Rudolf Hertz's 155th Birthday!
Heinrich Rudolf Hertz celebrated
in a Google doodleGerman physicist, whose experiments led to the wireless
telegraph and the radio, has his 155th birthday marked
Google's latest animated doodle celebrates the 155th birthday of
Heinrich Hertz, the German physicist whose experiments with electromagnetic waves led to the development of the wireless telegraph and the radio.
Born in
Hamburg, where he demonstrated great skill in grasping the dynamics of physics even in boyhood, he later enrolled to study the subject in
Berlin following a year at the
University of Munich.
In Berlin, his progress in investigating electromagnetic phenomena was so rapid that in February 1880 he received his PhD – on electromagnetic induction in rotating spheres – at the age of 22.
After becoming a professor at
Karlsruhe Technische Hochschule in 1885, Hertz turned his attentions to open electrical circuits and demonstrated electromagnetic induction to his students using a condenser discharging through an open loop.
In the course of doing this, he noticed an unanticipated phenomenon, the emergence of 'side-sparks' in another nearby loop. By 1888, he was able to demonstrate that the electromagnetic emissions associated with these sparks behaved like waves.
The finding, which effectively clarified and expanded the electromagnetic theory of light that had been put forth by the British physicist
James Clerk Maxwell in 1884, was hailed as confirmation that electromagnetic waves could be transmitted and received.
Hertz's name later became the term used for radio and electrical frequencies, as in
hertz (Hz),
kilohertz (kHz) and
megahertz (MHz).
He died in Bonn in 1894 (aged 36) after contracting
Wegener's granulomatosis, a rare disorder in which blood vessels become inflamed, and was buried in
Ohlsdorf, Hamburg.
