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Heinrich Rudolf Hertz

Male 1857 - 1894  (36 years)    Has 13 ancestors but no descendants in this family tree.

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  • Name Heinrich Rudolf Hertz 
    Birth 22 Feb 1857  Hamburg, Deutschland Find all individuals with events at this location 
    Gender Male 
    Prominent People physicist 
    Death 1 Jan 1894  Bonn, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Deutschland Find all individuals with events at this location 
    Burial Ohlsdorf Find all individuals with events at this location 
    Siblings 1 Sibling 
    Person ID I370562  Geneagraphie
    Links To This person is also Heinrich Hertz at Wikipedia 
    Last Modified 29 Dec 2004 

    Father Dr. jur. David Gustav Hertz,   b. 1827   d. 1914 (Age 87 years) 
    Mother Anna Elisabeth Pfefferkorn,   b. 1835   d. 1910 (Age 75 years) 
    Family ID F146702  Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  • Event Map Click to hide
    Link to Google MapsBirth - 22 Feb 1857 - Hamburg, Deutschland Link to Google Earth
    Link to Google MapsDeath - 1 Jan 1894 - Bonn, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Deutschland Link to Google Earth
     = Link to Google Earth 
    Pin Legend  : Address       : Location       : City/Town       : County/Shire       : State/Province       : Country       : Not Set

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  • Notes 
    • After attending a private Realschule, Heinrich prepared himself, by private study, for the Johanneum at which, after only a year, he passed his Abitur (GCE A-levels), the best in his class. He showed an early interest in the natural sciences, and a practical skill in building physics equipment. He was also an enthusiastic linguist, learning Arabic and Sanskrit. After years of study and travel in Frankfurt, Dresden, Munich and Berlin, with a stopover in Kiel, in 1880 he received his Ph.D. magna cum laude from the University of Berlin with a thesis on the electromagnetic induction in rotating spheres. In Berlin he studied under Kirschhoff and Hermann von Helmholz. He became professor of experimental physics at the Karlsruhe Polytechnic at the age of 28. He carried out extensive investigations into the connection between light and electricity. He was the first to prove experimentally that electricity had a wave form and that electric waves could be relected and broken. In 1883 he began his studies of the 1865 electromagnetic theory of James Clark Maxwell, and generated waves known as Hertz Waves in the laboratory and measured their length and velosity. He showed that the nature of their vibration and their suseptibility to reflection and refraction were the same as those of light and heat waves. By so doing he established beyond any doubt that light and heat are electromagnetic radiation. In 1889, Hertz was appointed professor of physics at the University of Bonn, where he continued his research on the discharge of electricity in rarefied gases.
      A lecture to professional colleagues in the autumn of 1889 in Heidelberg can be seen as the "birth" of radio and sound film. He was also the discoverer of the photoelectric effect, and contributed to the elasticity theory. He died after a long illness. His early death prevented him from experiencing the practical results of his work. He is buried in the Jewish cemetery. His scientific papers were translated into English and published in three volumes:
      Electric Waves (1893), Miscellaneous Papers (1896), and Principles of Mechanics (1899).

      Gustav Ludwig Hertz born on 22.07.1887 in Hamburg was a nephew of Heinrich Hertz. He was the German physicist
      who, with James Franck, received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1925 for work that confirmed the theory that energy can be
      absorbed by an atom only in definite amounts. He studied at the universities of Göttingen, Munich, and Berlin, and was
      appointed an assistant in physics at the University of Berlin in 1913, where he began to work with Franck. Their experiments
      showed that when an electron strikes an atom, it must possess a certain minimum energy in order to displace another electron
      from the atom. This energy is called an ionization potential and varies for different elements. Their measurements showed that
      the distinct wavelengths of light emitted by each element corresponds to the series of possible energy states for the atoms of
      that element. This had been foreseen by Niels Bohr, who utilized the quantum theory to explain the nature of the atom.
      In 1925 Gustav Hertz was appointed professor of physics at the University of Halle and in 1928 professor of physics at the
      Technische Hochschule in Berlin. In 1932 he devised a method of separating the isotopes of neon.
      Gustav Hertz was engaged in research in the Soviet Union from 1945 until 1954. He returned to East Germany in 1954 and
      was professor of physics and director of the Physics Institute in Leipzig until 1961. He died in East Berlin on 30.10.1975.

      In 1899, only five years after his death, Hamburg honoured Heinrich Hertz by naming a street in the district of Uhlenhorst
      after him. He is also one of the eminent Hamburg citizens whose head appears in relief on a column in the entrance hall of the
      Hamburg Rathaus (town hall). After the Second World War, Hamburg named the circa 270 metre TV Tower in
      Rentzelstraße after him, Heinrich-Hertz-Turm. The tower and its adjoining buildings are situated on the site of the former
      Emilie Wüstenfeld-Schule. A plaque, on the tower, approximately 20 metres above the ground, carries the inscription:
      Heinrich Hertz dem Sohn der Stadt Hamburg.



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