HEINRICH HERTZ 37i 



show us that something was hidden behind it all. Even 

 Hertz had only arrived at the discovery by way of his con- 

 firmation of an existing theory, which had been derived from 

 Faraday's great store, the man who always searched with 

 confidence in the unknown. 



Heinrich Hertz was the son of a lawyer and senator of 

 Hamburg, and partly of Jewish blood. He attended the 

 school in his birthplace, and then first studied technical 

 science, but soon decided to devote himself entirely to 

 physics.^ After three years of study in Munich and Berlin, 

 he became assistant to Helmholtz in Berlin, entered Kiel 

 University three years later, and only two years afterwards, 

 having in the meantime published a number of papers on 

 different parts of physics, he received a chair at the technical 

 high school in Karlsruhe. He there carried out his investi- 

 gations on electric waves, and he also soon married. In the 

 year 1889 he went to Bonn as the successor of Clausius. 

 While there he published his remarkable work on the Prin- 

 ciples of Mechanics, presented in a new form. ^ From 1892 

 onwards he became afflicted with an incurable disease, which 

 led to his death from blood poisoning at the age of only 

 thirty-seven years. 



FRIEDRICH HASENOHRL 

 1874-1915 



From the time of Faraday's discovery of self-induction, this 

 phenomenon could already be regarded as an inertia effect. 

 For the electric current in a wire behaves, on account of self 

 induction, like a current of water in a pipe. When it is set 



1 See Heinrich Hertz, Erinnerungen, Brief e, Tagebiicher, collected by his 

 daughter Dr. Johanna Hertz, Leipzig. 



» Trans, by D. E. Jones and J. T. Walley, London, 1899. 



