Heinrich Hertz

Heinrich Hertz got married to Elisabeth Doll who was a lecturer of geometry at the University of Karlsruhe. They couple had two daughters, named Johanna and Mathilde. Mathilde followed in the footsteps of his parents and excelled in academia as a biologist.

Heinrich Hertz died on 1 January 1894 in Bonn due to granulomatosis with polyangiitis also known as GPA. Two years prior to his death he had an operation to cure migraine but that had led to complications that culminated in his death, at the age of 36.

Hertz, the unit used to denote frequency, has been named in his honour.

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was born on 22 February 1857 to Gustav Ferdinand Hertz and Anna Elisabeth Pfefferkom, in Hamburg, Germany. His father worked as a barrister and went on to become a member of the senate.

Heinrich Hertz started attending the school Gelertenschule des Johanneums located in Hamburg and during his time at the school he showed genuine liking for the sciences and at the same time he also learnt languages like Sanskrit as well as Arabic.

After graduating from school and displaying a natural gifts for the sciences; Hertz had the option of either studying the sciences or go for engineering. However, engineering was not something he liked and after he secured support from his father; Hertz enrolled at the University of Munich in 1877.

In 1880, Heinrich Hertz submitted his doctoral thesis that dealt with the subject of electromagnetic induction and the same year the University of Berlin awarded him with his doctorate. In the following years, Hertz served as an assistant to Hermann von Helmholtz as part of his post-doctoral study at the University of Berlin.

Following his post-doctoral research at the University of Berlin under Hermann von Helmholtz, Heinrich Hertz was appointed as lecturer of theoretical physics in the University of Kiel in 1883 and two years later the University of Karlsruhe appointed him as a professor. It was in the same year that he was appointed at the University of Kiel that Hertz started his research on Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory.

Following his appointment at the University of Karlsruhe in 1885, Heinrich Hertz’s research on electromagnetic waves went up to a new level and during the next four years he managed to generate electromagnetic waves in the laboratory. Consequently, he successfully proved that both light as well as heat were nothing but electromagnetic radiations. The waves came to be called Hertzian in his honour.

In 1886, Heinrich Hertz started working on contact mechanics. His work on contact mechanics went on to inspire future research in the field many years later. He propounded his ideas in two separate papers.

The University of Bonn appointed Heinrich Hertz as the professor in physics in the year 1889 and that was where he was employed till the end of his career. It was during his tenure at the University of Bonn that Hertz found that thin metals could be penetrated by cathode rays. It was later developed into the ‘ray effect’. He also wrote the manuscript of the book ‘The Principles of Mechanics Presented in a New Form’ while he was employed at the University.

During his relatively short career as a scientist and theoretical physicist Heinrich Hertz accomplished a lot but it was his research on electromagnetic waves that stands out as the greatest achievement in his career. Prior to Hertz’s research electromagnetic waves had only been a theory propounded by James Clerk Maxell. Those waves were what came to be later known as radio waves.