Gustav Hertz
Hertz, Gustav (1887-1975), a German physicist, and his research partner, German physicist James Franck, shared the 1925 Nobel Prize in physics for their studies that confirmed the quantum theory of the structure of the atom. The quantum theory had been proposed in 1913 by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr.
Gustav Ludwig Hertz was born on July 22, 1887, in Hamburg, Germany. His uncle was Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, the German physicist who discovered electromagnetic waves in the late 1880's. Gustav Hertz received a doctorate from the University of Berlin in 1911.
In 1913, Hertz began working as a research assistant at the Physics Institute of the University of Berlin, where he met Franck. The two scientists collaborated in their research, and they conducted experiments that proved that Bohr's theory of the atom was correct.
In 1919, Hertz and Ellen Dihlmann married. They had two sons. Ellen Hertz died in 1941. Hertz and Charlotte Jollasse married in 1943.
From 1920 to 1925, Hertz worked in the research laboratory at the Philips Incandescent Lamp Works in Eindhoven, Netherlands. From 1925 to 1928, he served as professor of physics and director of the Physics Institute at the University of Halle in Germany. From 1928 to 1934, he was professor of physics at Charlottenburg Technical University in Germany, but he was forced to resign after he refused to sign an oath of loyalty to the Nazi government. He directed the research laboratory for the Siemens Company in Berlin, East Germany, from 1934 to 1945.
Hertz conducted research in the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1954. He then directed the physics institute at Karl Marx University in Leipzig, East Germany, until his retirement in 1961. Hertz died in Berlin on Oct. 30, 1975.