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Just over a century ago a young German physicist of moderate though hardly overpowering reputation announced that he had successfully generated electric waves. In Germany and England replications of Heinrich Hertz's discovery rapidly followed; in France and Switzerland controversy over precisely what Hertz had found swirled for about five years. Scarcely a decade after the original finding, Hertz's laboratory devices were being rapidly transformed into technological apparatus as Oliver Lodge, Guglielmo Marconi and others concentrated on sending signals through, and extracting them from, the new world of the electromagnetic spectrum. By then Hertz was dead, having succumbed to septicemia in 1895 at the age of thirty-eight. He had however ceased experimenting nearly five years before, having turned his attention instead to abstract questions that had long bothered him concerning the foundations of mechanics, and indeed of all of physics.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-2488-1_6

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