Hertz, The Discoverer of Electric Waves

Abstract

Fifty years have passed since those memorable researches of the young German physicist, Heinrich Rudolph Hertz, which have come to be regarded as the starting point of radio. For it was he who first detected, and measured, electromagnetic waves in space — waves which had been predicted, it is true, but which had never before been observed. It is not to be claimed, of course, that the radio art would have failed to be born were it not for his genius, for we know that almost simultaneously the experiments of Lodge in England were pointing with certainty to the same discoveries, and the speculations of others were revolving around the possibility of generating electric waves. Yet it was the remarkably clear vision of Hertz, combined with his consummate persistence and skill, that won for him the prize and justly enshrined his name among the immortal men of science.