Happy Birthday Heinrich Rudolf Hertz

[David Knaack]

As I mentioned last night during the spark transmitter presentation, Hertz was one of the key people behind the development of radio. 

He was born on this day, 1857 in Hamburg, German. 

After Maxwell published his theory of electromagnetism in 1865, Hertz was the first to experimentally prove out Maxwell's predictions. Hertz used a simple spark gap type transmitter to generate a radio wave. As a receiver he used a single loop of copper wire with the ends in very close proximity, so that when the radio wave produced by the spark transmitter induced current into the receiver loop, he would observe a tiny spark in the receiver's gap.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Hertz