Birth of the Hertz

On this day, 118 years ago a German physicist named Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was born, responsible for the first successful wireless transmission.  

In 1886, Heinrich Hertz made a first successful attempt and has proven on a practical case an existence of electromagnetic waves, first published in theory of electromagnetism by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865.

Hertz proved that electro magnetic waves can travel a certain distance. He put an oscillator and a zinc plate about 12 meters apart and the radiation actually started to travel between the two objects. With a ring detector, made of a copper wire, he recorded the electromagnetic wireless signals.

In later experiments, he was able to determine the radiation velocity and as he found out, it was the same as the speed of light.

To honor his great and as the future shows, very important legacy, in 1930 IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) established  a herz unit, better known as Hz. Hz represents the number of times that a repeated event occurs per second.

As you probably noticed, Google decided to honor the German scientist with a cool animated Google Doodle, representing electromagnetic waves, practically proven by Heinrich Rudolf Hertz.

Heinrich Hertz died at young age of 36.