Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was born on February 22, 1857 in Hamburg, Germany. He was the oldest of the five children of Gustav Ferdinand Hertz, a lawyer and later a senator and the head of the judiciary of the city of Hamburg, and Elizabeth Pfefferkorn Hertz. He had three younger brothers and one younger sister.
At age six Hertz entered the private school of Richard Lange, a taskmaster who had no patience with error. On Sundays he went to the Gewerbeschule for lessons in geometrical drawing. His skill in sketching and painting marked the limit of his artistic talent; he was totally unmusical. Very early Hertz gave evidence of his extraordinary aptitudes in mathematics, science, languages, and manual skills. The galvanometer and the spectroscope which he constructed as a teen-ager served him well during his university studies. In addition to a thorough acquaintance with Homer and the Greek dramatists, Hertz acquired through his own efforts a knowledge of Sanskrit and Arabic.
Following his graduation with highest honors from the gymnasium in Hamburg in 1875, he thought that his future lay with engineering. He spent a year in Frankfurt with an engineering firm, and in the summer of 1876 he attended courses at the Polytechnic in Dresden. After a year of volunteer military service in Berlin he began his regular engineering studies at the University of Munich in 1877. No sooner had the classes gotten under way than it dawned on Hertz that he would prefer physics to engineering.
He spent the winter of 1877/1878 studying the treatises of Pierre Simon de Laplace and Joseph Louis Lagrange and the spring in the laboratory working under G. von Jolly. To achieve the best training, he sought out the best teachers, and these were at the University of Berlin. Soon after his arrival there he became Hermann von Helmholtz's student. By spring 1879 Hertz completed the experimental verification of a question about electrical inertia, and his work won a gold medal at the university on August 4. His combination of theoretical and experimental work was so remarkable that during the next spring he was allowed to present his research as his doctoral dissertation, "On Induction in Rotating Spheres, " and received the degree magna cum laude.
After obtaining his degree, Hertz became Helmholtz's assistant at the Physikalisches Institut at the University of Berlin, and during his 3 years there his most remarkable achievement was his work on the pressure arising between two plates in contact. The influence of his conclusions on the construction of precision instruments was so great that his paper "On the Contact of Elastic Solids" was simultaneously published in a scientific and a technical magazine. But the promise of the future lay with his work on electric and cathode-tube discharge, published in 1883 in two papers.
Hertz next went to the University of Kiel, where he did some work on meteorological and thermoelectric problems, but his real interest was in James Clerk Maxwell's theory as shown by his paper from 1884, "On the Relations between Maxwell's Fundamental Electromagnetic Equations and the Fundamental Equations of the Opposing 'Electromagnetics. '" Hertz was at Karlsruhe as the head of the Physics Institute at the Polytechnic when he began his experimental research on the effect of electric and cathode-tube discharges. On surveying the equipment in his laboratory, Hertz came across two Riess spirals and found "that it was not necessary to discharge large batteries through one of these spirals to obtain sparks in the other; . .. that even the discharge of a small induction coil would do, provided it had to spring across a spark gap. " He soon noticed that the oscillations thus produced were rather regular.
By spring 1887 Hertz knew that sparks were more readily formed when the metalspheres forming the gap were exposed to ultraviolet radiation. This discovery put Hertz within reach of producing with relative ease oscillations of sufficiently high frequency with corresponding wavelengths that could be detected with apparatus tailored to the dimensions of ordinary laboratories. By summer he succeeded in showing the effect of a rectilinear electric oscillation upon a neighboring circuit. On November 10, 1887 he sent to the Berlin Academy the now historic report "On Electromagnetic Effects Produced by Electrical Disturbances in Insulators, " disclosing that he had obtained oscillatory inductive action at distances up to 12 meters.
While the result was a triumph for Maxwell's theory, Hertz knew that one also had to settle the question of the finite velocity of the propagation of the inductive effect across space. This he did in 1888, and the same year he also proved that electromagnetic waves could be reflected as predicted by Maxwell's theory. Later that year he accepted the chair of physics at the University of Bonn, which had been vacant since the death of R. J. E. Clausius. Hertz's work at Bonn aimed at a generalization of a cherished idea of his revered teacher, Helmholtz, that electromagnetic effects were products of the motion of the ether atoms, obeying the law of least action.
Hertz now wanted a formulation of the whole science of physics along these lines. His Principles of Mechanics took him 3 years to write; it was published posthumously. In 1889 Hertz was the principal speaker at the Congress of German Scientists at Heidelberg, where he described the impact of the verification of Maxwell's theory on the physics of the future. Hertz succumbed to an infection of the inner ear on January 1, 1894.
Hertz’s chief contribution to physics was in bringing about a decision regarding the proper principles for representing electrodynamics. His experimental researches in Karlsruhe settled once and for all the long conflict in nineteenth-century physics over the merits of action at a distance versus contiguous action. His discovery was a key step on the path to the use of radio waves in communications and broadcasting and the use of all the many invisible octaves of the electromagnetic spectrum to the service of humanity.
(Mit seinen Forschungen zu elektromagnetischen Wellen lief...)
(This classic created a new system of mechanics based on ...)
(Electric waves being researches on the propagation of ele...)
In Karlsruhe Hertz met Elizabeth Doll, the daughter of a well-known geodesist, and married her on July 31, 1886. He left behind his wife and two daughters, Johanna and Mathilde, all of whom emigrated from Nazi Germany in 1937 to settle in Cambridge, England.
