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Concept
Gustav Ludwig Hertz
Summary
Gustav Ludwig Hertz (ˈɡʊs.taf ˈluːt.vɪç hɛʁt͡s; 22 July 1887 – 30 October 1975) was a German experimental physicist and Nobel Prize winner for his work on inelastic electron collisions in gases, 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 Maximilian 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. In 1915 he joined Fritz Haber's unit that would introduce poisonous chlorine gas as a weapon. 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).
Official source
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