Gustav Hertz
| Gustav Ludwig Hertz | |
|---|---|
Hertz in 1925
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| Born |
22 July 1887 Free Hanseatic city of Hamburg, German Empire |
| Died | 30 October 1975 (aged 88) East Berlin, East Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | Halle University |
| Alma mater | Humboldt University of Berlin |
| Doctoral advisor |
Heinrich Rubens Max Planck |
| Doctoral students | Heinz Pose |
| Known for | Franck–Hertz experiment |
| Notable awards |
Nobel Prize in Physics (1925) Max Planck Medal (1951) |
| Notes | |
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Father of Carl Hellmuth Hertz, co-inventor of echocardiography
Grandfather of , inventor of the metal-jet-anode microfocus X-ray tube |
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Gustav Ludwig Hertz (22 July 1887 – 30 October 1975) was a German experimental physicist and Nobel Prize winner, and a nephew of Heinrich Rudolf Hertz.
Hertz was born in Hamburg, the son of Auguste (née Arning) and a lawyer, Gustav Theodor Hertz (1858–1904),Heinrich Rudolf Hertz' brother. He attended the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums before studying at the Georg-August University of Göttingen (1906–1907), the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich (1907–1908), and the Humboldt University of Berlin (1908–1911). He received his doctorate in 1911 under Heinrich Leopold Rubens.
From 1911 to 1914, Hertz was an assistant to Rubens at the University of Berlin. It was during this time that Hertz and James Franck performed experiments on inelastic electron collisions in gases, known as the Franck–Hertz experiments, and for which they received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1925.
During World War I, Hertz served in the military from 1914. He was seriously wounded in 1915. In 1917, he returned to the University of Berlin as a Privatdozent. In 1920, he took a job as a research physicist at the Philips Incandescent Lamp Factory in Eindhoven, which he held until 1925.
In 1925, Hertz became ordinarius professor and director of the Physics Institute of the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. In 1928 he became ordinarius professor of experimental physics and director of the Physics Institute of the Technische Hochschule Berlin ("THB"), now Technical University of Berlin. While there, he developed an isotope separation technique via gaseous diffusion. Since Hertz was an officer during World War I, he was temporarily protected from National Socialist policies and the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, but eventually the policies and laws became more stringent, and at the end of 1934, he was forced to resign his position at THB, as he was classified as a "second degree part-Jew" (his paternal grandfather Gustav Ferdinand Hertz (originally named David Gustav Hertz) (1827–1914) had been Jewish as a child, before his whole family had converted to Lutheranism in 1834). He then took a position at Siemens, as director of Research Laboratory II. While there, he continued his work on atomic physics and ultrasound, but he eventually discontinued his work on isotope separation. He held this position until he departed for the Soviet Union in 1945.
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