Hertz, HEINRICH

Hertz, HEINRICH, physicist, was born 22d February 1857, at Hamburg, and studied at Berlin, where in 1880 he became assistant to Helmholtz. In 1883 he began to lecture in Kiel, in 1885 was called to the technical school at Karlsruhe, and in 1889 succeeded Clausius at Bonn. He greatly advanced the science of electricity, was the continuator of the work of Faraday and Clerk-Maxwell, and was a singularly ingenious experimenter. He died 1st January 1894. In the three volumes of his collected works (1894) the most important discussions are those on the relation of light and electricity, on the diffusion of electric force, and on the principles of mechanics. See the éloge by Planck (1894), and Lodge in Nature for June 1894.