How Heinrich Rudolf Hertz revealed the invisible world (CS Monitor)
Mega happy birthday Herr Hertz ~ pinto
How Heinrich Rudolf Hertz revealed the invisible world
Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, the man behind today's Google doodle, found what eyes could not see. Today would have been Heinrich Hertz's 155th birthday.
By Chris Gaylord / February 22, 2012
Our story starts in 1873, when a Scottish physicist named James Maxwell tried to convince people that light, electricity, and magnetism were all versions of the same phenomenon. It was a weird idea at the time. How could the invisible power of magnets go hand-in-hand with the radiant glow of candlelight? They're obviously different to the human eye, but actually quite similar in hidden ways.
Maxwell was the first to figure out that light moves like a wave, just as magnetism and electricity move through the "electromagnetic field." This was a huge breakthrough – it made sense of the invisible world in the same way that Isaac Newton and his falling apple unified the visible world. Maxwell's math checked out, yet he couldn't prove that his ideas were true. He challenged other scientists to come up with experiments that could demonstrate this invisible science to the naked eye.
A decade later, Hertz found a way.
In his lab, the German scientist rigged up two tiny brass spheres, placed very close to one another. When he electrified them, sparks leaped from one ball to the other. If Maxwell was correct, these sparks should send invisible waves radiating through the air. To test the theory, he needed to build a receiver. This second instrument consisted of a curved wire that almost made a full circle, except for a tiny gap at the top. He placed the transmitter and the receiver several yards apart and made sure that nothing connected the two. Sure enough, when sparks shot through the transmitter, invisible waves traveled through the air, lighting up new sparks on the receiver.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2012/0222/How-Heinrich-Rudolf-Hertz-revealed-the-invisible-world
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