Heinrich Rudolf Hertz gets a Google Doodle for his 155th birthday

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz gets a Google Doodle for his 155th birthday

Google celebrated German physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz’s 155th birthday Wednesday by turning its logo into a frequency wave.

You may recognize Hertz’s name from the unit of measurement — the hertz — which measures cycles per second.

In his brief life (he died at the age of 36), he made important contributions to the study of electromagnetism, confirming the existence of electromagnetic waves through experiment in 1886 while he was a professor at the University of Karlsruhe.

While his discoveries would eventually lead to the inventions of the wireless telegraph, radio and television, Hertz didn’t realize the importance of his work at the time. After an experiment that helped establish thephotoelectric effect, he commented that “it’s of no use whatsoever.”

“This is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right — we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there.”

Hertz died in Bonn, Germany, in 1894 and was buried in Hamburg.

Thirty-six years later, the International Electrotechnical Commission established the hertz as a standard unit of measurement.