An animated Google Doodle is cutting a colourful dash on Google's homepage today to celebrate what would have been the 155th birthday of Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, the physicist who clarified and expanded the electromagnetic theory of light, paving the way for the invention of the telegraph, radio, and, latterly, television.
The electromagnetic theory had first been posited by the Scottish mathematician and physicist James Clerk Maxwell. It was Maxwell who demonstrated that electric and magnetic travel through space in the form of waves, and at the constant speed of light. Maxwell's findings were published in A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field in 1865.
On 22 February 1857, Hertz was born in Hamburg, Germany. His father, Gustav Ferdinand Hertz, was a writer and later a senator, while his mother was Anna Elisabeth Pfefferkorn.
Showing an aptitude for the sciences as well as languages, Hertz studied sciences and engineering in the cities of Dresden, Munich and Berlin.
He obtained his PhD from University of Berlin and subsequently remained there to study under Hermann von Helmholtz, the German physician and physicist known for his theories on the conservation of energy.
Then, in 1883, Hertz took up a post as a lecturer in theoretical physics at University of Kiel.
It was in 1885 that he took up a full professorship at University of Karlsruhe, where he discovered electromagnetic waves.
