In honor of the 155th birthday of German physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, Google is celebrating with a new animated Doodle. The doodle replaces the search engine’s official logo on its homepage. When users click on the bright, undulating image, information about the scientist is loaded.
Hertz is known for showing that electricity can be transmitted via electromagnetic waves. The scientific proof paved the way towards developing wireless telegraph and radio. Hertz was the first person to send and receive radio waves, and proved light waves are electromagnetic radiation.
Sophia Foster-Dimino, an illustrator and cartoonist who was hired by the Google Doodle team in 2010, shortly after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, created the Hertz doodle. “For this Doodle, we chose to create a simple and elegant homage for (Heinrich) Hertz,” she told Comic Riffs. She added “so extensive were his experiments that there’s a unit of frequency, the hertz, named for him.” The physicist became most well-known for the hertz unit of frequency, which became part of the metric system in 1933.
While working on the Hertz doodle, Foster-Dimino added that “as with most math and science Doodles, we consulted an internal mailing list of (Google’s) science enthusiasts.” Hertz dedicated his life to science, working as a physics professor at Karlsrube Polytechnic by 1885. His labwork there included measuring the velocity and wavelength, the reflection and refraction of electromagnetic waves. Hertz died in 1894, at the age of 36.
Written by: Karen Benardello
