Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/419

Rh was the exceptionally fine and well-endowed laboratory of the institution, which furnished the most desirable facilities for unlimited experimenting. At Karlsruhe Prof. Hertz found a wife who was in every way a lovely and graceful, devoted and highly intellectual companion to him. His life was from this time on divided between the pursuit of his main object, the progress of science, and home happiness; both he and his wife derived rare gratification from literature and the beauty of Nature. It was from Karlsruhe that he went to Heidelberg, there to enjoy the proudest moment of his life, in the year 1889, when, greeted with enthusiastic applause by most prominent scientists, he stood up on the platform to tender an account of his researches and their results. Who that saw him there, the very picture of youthful vigor and life, could have foreboded that those fine and penetrating eyes, to which for the first time since our earth turned around its poles electric waves had been revealed, were so soon to be closed in death!

Soon Prof. Hertz received flattering calls to the most prominent universities; he preferred the smaller town of Bonn, where he settled down in 1890, even to Berlin, the capital, because what he sought after was the most serious and fruitful work, not glory and outward advantage. In Bonn he succeeded to the eminent physicist, Prof. Clausius; this was in itself a high distinction conferred upon so young a man as Prof. Hertz. Considered all over Europe as one of the most prominent, he was looked up to as one of the most promising leaders in the science of electricity. Not only had his own country conferred high honors upon this young and ardent worker, but the chief academies of England, France, Italy, Austria, and Russia now crowned his efforts with prizes, honorary memberships, and other tokens of universal esteem and gratitude.

Up to the middle of this century the phenomena of electricity and magnetism had been only inadequately explained by applying to them Newton's law of gravitation and asserting that, in the same way as celestial bodies exercise power of attraction at a distance and without the intervention of a medium, the two kinds of material electricity were attracting and repelling each other, while passing through space or through non-conductors.

It was the great English physicist Faraday who first sought to carry the knowledge of electricity to a higher stage, by entering upon the study of phenomena with a mind free from preconceived opinions. He put forth as the foundation on which to base new theories his observations of electric and magnetic forces, their influence upon each other, their attractions for material bodies, and their propagation by the transmission of the excitation from one point of space to another. He questioned the