Birth of Heinrich Hertz

Heinrich Hertz was born on 22 February 1857 in Hamburg. A German physicist, Hertz was the first to demonstrate the existence of electromagnetic waves, which had been predicted by James Clerk Maxwell. In experiments at Karlsruhe in the late 1880s he generated radio waves with a spark-gap oscillator, detected them across a room and showed that they travel at the speed of light and can be reflected and refracted like light. He also discovered the photoelectric effect, later explained by Einstein. He did not foresee practical uses of radio, which others developed soon afterward. He died young from a bone disease, and the unit of frequency, the hertz, is named after him.

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