HERTZ, THE DISCOVERER OF ELECTRIC WAVES 329 



treatise on mechanics. In the summer of 1892 he suffered a severe 

 illness which eventually led to chronic blood poisoning, of which he 

 died, after indescribable suffering, on January 1, 1894. He would have 

 been just thirty-seven years old the following month. 



Although the fame of Hertz rests primarily on his electric wave 

 researches, these constitute by no means the whole of his work. His 

 collected papers, edited by the German physicist. Dr. Philipp Lenard, 

 and admirably translated into English by Professor D. E. Jones and 

 associates, comprise three volumes. The first consists mainly of his 

 miscellaneous earlier papers, some twenty-odd titles altogether. One 

 of these, published in 1884, "On the Relations between Maxwell's 

 Fundamental Electromagnetic Equations and the Fundamental Equa- 

 tions of the Opposing Electromagnetics," marked an important step in 

 the development of Hertz's ideas, and has been called his greatest 

 contribution to theoretical physics. In it he opposed the old orthodox 

 theories of electric phenomena based on action at a distance, which 

 were supported by most of the Continental physicists, and definitely 

 aligned himself with the followers of Maxwell. This volume also 

 contains his semipopular Heidelberg lecture of 1889, "On the Relations 

 between Light and Electricity," giving a general account of his more 

 recent work. It strikingly illustrates the charm and felicity of style 

 he could employ in the presentation of a difficult subject, and cannot 

 fail to be read, and reread, with pleasure and admiration. The volume 

 ends with a eulogy of Helmholtz on the occasion of his seventieth 

 birthday, wherein the pupil, in equally graceful language, paid homage 

 to his beloved and inspiring preceptor. These two papers reveal so 

 clearly between the lines the manner of man their author was. 



The second volume contains the papers on electric waves, which 

 had been collected by the author himself, as a result of numerous 

 requests for reprints, and published under the German title, "Unter- 

 suchungen iiber die Ausbreitung der Elektrischen Kraft," and later in 

 English as "Electric Waves," with a lucid introduction by Hertz 

 explaining the motive and significance of each of the separate papers. 

 One of the first of these describes an important by-product of the 

 electric wave studies, the discovery of the effect of ultraviolet light 

 upon an electrical discharge. This discovery itself uncovered a new 

 wealth of physical problems and the subject became immediately of 

 great interest to many experimenters, most of whom at the time little 

 suspected that this subsidiary effect was not the main discovery, or 

 imagined that electrical science was on the eve of much greater con- 

 quests. The paper attracted attention to Hertz and aroused a popular 

 interest in him, so that everything coming from him thereafter was 



