Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was born in 1857 in Hamburg, then a sovereign state of the German Confederation, into a prosperous and cultured Hanseatic family.

[4] While studying at the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums in Hamburg, Hertz showed an aptitude for sciences as well as languages, learning Arabic.

In 1880, Hertz obtained his PhD from the University of Berlin, and for the next three years remained for post-doctoral study under Helmholtz, serving as his assistant.

Helmholtz had also proposed the "Berlin Prize" problem that year at the Prussian Academy of Sciences for anyone who could experimentally prove an electromagnetic effect in the polarization and depolarization of insulators, something predicted by Maxwell's theory.

Hertz did produce an analysis of Maxwell's equations during his time at Kiel, showing they did have more validity than the then prevalent "action at a distance" theories.

Between 1886 and 1889 Hertz conducted a series of experiments that would prove the effects he was observing were results of Maxwell's predicted electromagnetic waves.

He stated that,[23][24][25] 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.

However, as J. J. Thomson explained in 1897, Hertz placed the deflecting electrodes in a highly-conductive area of the tube, resulting in a strong screening effect close to their surface.

[28] Nine years later Hertz began experimenting and demonstrated that cathode rays could penetrate very thin metal foil (such as aluminium).

In 1887, he made observations of the photoelectric effect and of the production and reception of electromagnetic (EM) waves, published in the journal Annalen der Physik.

A glass panel placed between the source of EM waves and the receiver absorbed UV that assisted the electrons in jumping across the gap.

His work basically summarises how two axi-symmetric objects placed in contact will behave under loading, he obtained results based upon the classical theory of elasticity and continuum mechanics.

Kenneth L. Johnson, K. Kendall and A. D. Roberts (JKR) used this theory as a basis while calculating the theoretical displacement or indentation depth in the presence of adhesion in 1971.

[36] Despite preceding his great work on electromagnetism (which he himself considered with his characteristic soberness to be trivial[23]), Hertz's research on contact mechanics has facilitated the age of nanotechnology.

Hertz also described the "Hertzian cone", a type of fracture mode in brittle solids caused by the transmission of stress waves.

[37] Hertz always had a deep interest in meteorology, probably derived from his contacts with Wilhelm von Bezold (who was his professor in a laboratory course at the Munich Polytechnic in the summer of 1878).

As an assistant to Helmholtz in Berlin, he contributed a few minor articles in the field, including research on the evaporation of liquids,[38] a new kind of hygrometer, and a graphical means of determining the properties of moist air when subjected to adiabatic changes.

[41] Because Hertz's family converted from Judaism to Lutheranism two decades before his birth, his legacy ran afoul of the Nazi government in the 1930s, a regime that classified people by "race" instead of religious affiliation.

Hertz's youngest daughter, Mathilde, lost a lectureship at Berlin University after the Nazis came to power and within a few years she, her sister, and their mother left Germany and settled in England.

[45] The SI unit hertz (Hz) was established in his honor by the International Electrotechnical Commission in 1930 for frequency, an expression of the number of times that a repeated event occurs per second.

[46] It was adopted by the CGPM (Conférence générale des poids et mesures) in 1960, officially replacing the previous name, "cycles per second" (cps).