Abstract
During November, 1887, in his Karlsruhe laboratory, Heinrich Hertz observed for the first time “wire waves,” that is, regular alternating currents with a very high frequency in conductive wires. These were the only electric waves he had yet detected. He described them to his master Hermann von Helmholtz in Berlin:
In the meantime I have succeeded in several further experiments. By means of the oscillations I used in my previous work I am now able to produce standing waves with many nodes in straight stretched wires. If I content myself with 4 to 5 nodes, I can make them almost as clearly visible as the nodes of a vibrating string. (Letter of December 8th, 1887; MLD 239, emphasis added).
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Notes
Work partially supported by Spanish DGICYT under Research Program n. PS 92–0048.
I refer to Hertz’s published papers by their chapter-numbers in Electric Waves. The index Ak labels the publishing version of some of them, published in the Akademieberichte in Berlin. The chronological order of their publication is N26Ak, NQ7Ak, NQ5–7 (the so called Conversion Trilogy in EW 80–123), N28 (EW 124–136), Ne9 (EW 137–159), N211 (EW 172–185), see Doncel 1991 and Table here on p. 76.
It is noteworthy how difficult it was to understand this point. So conspicuous a physicist as William Thomson ( Lord Kelvin) is a case in point. Being the inspirer of Maxwell’s mathematical formulation of the electromagnetic field theory, he could not accept his electromagnetic explanation of the transverse oscillation of light, not even after writing the preface to the English translation of Hertz’s Electric Waves (see Smith and Wise 1989, 458–482 ).
Put aside the fact that string vibrations are transverse and sound waves longitudinal.
This expression gives the intensity, F, of the central force between two charges, e, and e’, as a function of their distance, r, and its time derivatives: their relative velocity, dr/dt, and acceleration, d2r/dt2. The speed of light, c, appears here only as the relation between the electrostatic and the electrodynamic units.
Helmholtz studied the action of his electrodynamic force on a polarizable dielectric: different longitudinal and transverse waves were produced as a function of the value of k. Consequently, Helmholtz could claim to cover Maxwell’s theory as a limiting case of his own, where these were only transverse waves (the speed of the longitudinal waves coming out to be infinite).
These include (a) Hertz’s published papers (see note 2 above); (b) Hertz’s short diary and letters to his parents and to Helmholtz, published by his daughter in Memoirs, Letters, Diaries (very few other interesting letters of this time are preserved in the Deutsches Museum, Munich); (c) the recently discovered Laboratory Notes, or Protokolle, written by Hertz mainly in the crucial period November—December 1887 (Hertz and Doncel 1995); and (d) the historical reconstructions by Hertz: the introductory chapter 1 to Electric Waves, written in December 1891 for the Untersuchungen, and “Recherches sur les Ondulations Électriques,” written in March 1889 for the Archives de Genève.
Buchwald and O’Hara in preparation. See also O’Hara 1988b.
These lengths were 100, 200, 250, 400 and 500 cm; see Hertz and Doncel 1995, 251–257, and its final Table I, which was successively published in papers N27Ak and N27, and in EW 118. See, for this analysis, Doncel and Roqué 1990, 184–185, or Doncel 1991, figures 1 and 2.
See experiments 50–52 in Hertz and Doncel 1995, 259. These further data are tabulated in the first line of Table II on page 261, which corresponds to the first half line of the upper table in EW 120.
The paper was sent to the Akademieberichte on January 21st, after the efforts of checking and editing the whole; see letters of January 1st and 15th in MLD 247–51.
Hertz and Doncel 1995, 263–265 for the text and 267–269 for the figures; they are reproduced here (Figures 2 and 3) from their English redrawn version; previously we knew only the vague sentence in the diary of December 30th, MLD 247.
Note that the translation of both Inductions-and elektrodynamisch by “electromagnetic” in Electric Waves even in the titles of these three papers, confuses matters almost beyond hope.
es ist zugleich die Wellenlänge der elektrodynamischen Wellen, welche die Maxwell’sche Anschauung als Wirkung der Schwingungen nach aussen voraussetzt.” I have translated literally, retaining the original emphasis.
Uberlegungen über die Maxwellsche Theorie.”
Die aussichtsvollsten elektrischen Theorien”; see diary of November 181h and letters of December 23rd, 1887 and January 1st, 1888 in MLD 239, 245 and 249.
une preuve directe déduite d’expériences sûres manquait cependant encore,...” “...vibrations électriques assez rapides pour en tirer une preuve des hypothèses de Maxwell. Ces hypothèses se trouvèrent pleinement confirmées.” See Hertz 1889, 282–283.
See diary of September 121h, 1888 and February 7th, 1889, and letter of December 516, 1990 in MLD 259, 279 and 307–9; see also O’Hara and Pricha 1987.
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Doncel, M.G. (1998). On Hertz’s Conceptual Conversion: From Wire Waves to Air Waves. In: Baird, D., Hughes, R.I.G., Nordmann, A. (eds) Heinrich Hertz: Classical Physicist, Modern Philosopher. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 198. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8855-3_6
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