Discovery of radio waves 125 years ago "changed the world"

By Susanne Kupke Nov 11, 2011, 13:35 GMT

Karlsruhe, Germany - One hundred and twenty five years ago on Friday, German scientist Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of electromagnetic waves, paving the way for wireless telegraphy, the radio and the telecommunications revolution that followed.

Hertz made his discovery through building a rudimentary device which was capable of producing and detecting radio waves. It was an event that 'completely changed our world,' says Volker Krebs, who chairs the Heinrich Hertz Institute in the city of Karlsruhe, where Hertz made the discovery on November 11, 1886.

Hertz used a high voltage induction coil and a spark gap to cause a spark discharge between two poles.

He managed to prove that electricity can be transmitted in electromagnetic waves, which travel at the speed of light.

'It is amazing the resources Hertz used to prove the existence of electromagnetic waves. He had virtually no equipment,' Krebs says.

Today, Hertz (Hz) is the name of the unit used to measure electromagnetic frequency and other cycles.

However, Hertz never thought of the practical implications of his experiment. He was just building on the work of Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell, who had mathematically predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves over a decade earlier.

'His primary interest was research. He was not particularly interested in what could be done with it,' Krebs explains.

The first radio receiver was built in 1896 by Russian scientist Alexander Popov, who two years later demonstrated transmission of radio waves between different campus buildings in St Petersburg.

Italian Guglielmo Marconi, meanwhile, has gone down in the history books as the father of long distance radio transmission and for his development of the radio telegraph system.

Hertz was born on February 22, 1857 in Hamburg before going on to study in Berlin. He later taught in Kiel, Karlsruhe and Bonn.

'He was a spirit as capable of the highest clarity and detail of logical thought, as he was able to pay the greatest attention in the observation of inconspicuous phenomena,' his friend and patron Hermann von Helmholtz wrote.

For the ambitious University of Karlsruhe, where Hertz discovered electromagnetic waves, the young scientist was a godsend, although the offer of a professorship was also attractive to the then 28-year-old.

'Hertz was happy with the working conditions that he found there,' says Klaus Nippert, archivist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).

Germany was experiencing an economic downturn at the time so Hertz had relatively few students and had plenty of time to research.

Hertz also met his future wife Elisabeth Doll in Karlsruhe. The couple had two daughters.

Krebs is convinced that Hertz would have won a Nobel Prize for his discovery had he not died in 1894 of blood poisoning at the age of 36. The first Nobel was awarded seven years after his death.