When you get old, you remember a lot of things that some younger people don’t — or have never even heard of.
I threw out a really old electrical tool that no longer worked a few days ago. I noticed by the tag on it that it was designed for 110 volt, 60 cycle operation. Our daughter, who has a degree in electrical engineering, never used “cycle” in her courses — she used “hertz.”
When I went to school, cycle was the term used for the unit of frequency. I never heard the term hertz associated with frequency until I was a senior in college. Frequency was described as cycles per second. That term came from the fact that sound waves have a frequency measurable in their number of oscillations, or “cycles” per second.
In 1960, the International System of Units was organized at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (GCPM) and officially changed “cycles per second” to “hertz.” I first read about this change in a Hewlett-Packard Journal I received in the mail. When I told people about the change they didn’t believe it and pretty much just wrote it off as another “Jimmy-ism.”
It took awhile, but cycles per second was largely replaced by hertz by the 1970s. So where did the name hertz come from?
Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was a German physicist who was the first person to irrefutable prove the existence of electromagnetic waves —the foundation of understanding the behavior of light and all things wireless. Hertz’s greatest accomplishment was proving Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism. Maxwell’s theory predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves, that electromagnetic waves move at the speed of light, and light itself was just such a wave.
Hertz’s work and experiments showed that light and “Maxwell waves” are both forms of electromagnetic radiation obeying James Clerk Maxwell’s equations. And he is the man whose peers honored him by attaching his name to the unit of frequency. Now all us old guys have to remember that a cycle per second is one hertz.
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