Answer to Question #208883 in Physics for Jade

Question

Using your own words, describe how Heinrich Hertz produced radio pulses or waves.

Answer 1

For his receiver he used a length of copper wire in the shape of a rectangle whose dimensions were 120 cm by 80 cm. The wire had its own spark-gap.

Hertz applied high voltage a.c. electricity across the central spark-gap of the transmitter, creating sparks.

The sparks caused violent pulses of electric current within the copper wires leading out to the zinc spheres.

As Maxwell had predicted, the oscillating electric charges produced electromagnetic waves – radio waves – which spread out at the speed of light through the air around the wire.

Hertz detected the waves with his copper wire receiver – sparks jumped across its spark gap, even though it was as far as 1.5 meters away from the transmitter. These sparks were caused by the arrival of electromagnetic waves from the transmitter generating violent electrical vibrations in the receiver.

This was an experimental triumph. Hertz had produced and detected radio waves.