Gustav Hertz

Gustav Hertz (1887-1975), German physicist and Nobel laureate, born in Hamburg, and educated at the universities of Göttingen, Munich, and Berlin. In conjunction with the American physicist James Franck, Hertz studied the effect of the impact of electrons on atoms. As a result of these experiments, which were the first demonstration of the quantum theory of the German physicist Max Planck, Hertz and Franck were awarded the 1925 Nobel Prize in physics. Hertz served as professor of experimental physics at the University of Halle from 1925 to 1927 and at the Berlin Technische Hochschule from 1928 to 1935, when he became director of the Siemens Research Laboratory in Berlin. In 1945 he went to the USSR to continue his work in atomic research; he was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1951.