Oh, That Hertz! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Coulomb

Charles Augustin de Coulomb was born in Angouleme, France, on the 14th of June, 1736. He was a qualified engineer whose work took him as far afield as Martinique in the West Indies. In the 1770s he began to devote most of his time to writing treatises on applied mechanics, which were highly thought-of by the French Academie de Sciences. Coulomb continued his research in this field, winning several prizes for his papers, which eventually saw him elected to a position in the mechanics section of the Academie de Sciences. From this point, Coulomb devoted all his time to the study of physics, in particular electricity and magnetism.

He developed a theory of attraction and repulsion between bodies bearing the same and opposite electric charge; the theory for which he is best known today and remembered in the unit of electrical charge bearing his name.

Answer: Ampere

Born in Lyon, France, in 1775, Andre-Marie Ampere was schooled at home by his father and showed an aptitude for mathematics at an early age. Ampere's father was executed during the French Revolution, which so devastated the young Ampere he stopped studying mathematics for 18 months.

He was drawn out of his depression when he met his future wife Julie. Unfortunately, Julie died in 1803, which prompted Ampere to move to Paris, where he was appointed as a tutor in analysis at Ecole Polytechnique.

He conducted research in a number of areas besides mathematics, including physics and chemistry, and by the early 1820s had developed a combined theory of electricity and magnetism. He refined this theory over the years, eventually publishing an important paper in 1826 that was to become the basis for all 19th century developments in electricity and magnetism and for which he is best remembered today.

Answer: Joule

James Prescott Joule was born in Manchester, England, in 1818. Like Ampere, he was home schooled and was sent to university at Cambridge when he was sixteen. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing at this time, and one of Joule's ambitions was to replace steam-driven engines with electric motors, so his first investigations were into the production of heat. Since Joule's research was self-funded, he was free to pursue the areas he wished and this resulted in him establishing the equivalence between heat and mechanical work as well as the cooling effect of rapidly expanded gas (the latter of which is used in refrigeration systems). Joule can also be considered as an inventor; among his inventions were arc welding and the displacement pump.

Answer: Becquerel

In 1896, Henri Becquerel discovered a highly-penetrating kind of radiation when he stored a uranium compound in a drawer with some photographic plates (as you did in those days, I guess!). Soon after, Marie Curie joined him in his research and she discovered that certain elements emitted radiation that remained unchanged regardless of what compound the element was present in. Because of this finding, it was proposed that the source of this radiation was the atoms' nuclei; we now define radioactivity as high-energy radiation emitted by nuclei.

The radioactivity of a sample measured in becquerel is equivalent to one nuclear disintegration occurring per second. Another measurement of radioactivity, the curie (a non-SI unit), is equivalent to 3.7x10^10 disintegrations per second (which is the radioactive output of radium-226).

Answer: Volt

Count Alessandro Volta was born in Como, Italy. He is best known for his pioneering work in electricity, including the invention of the electric battery. He became a Professor of physics at the Royal School in Como in 1774 and a year later had devised an apparatus that produced static electricity. For the next few years that followed, he devoted his time to studying chemistry, including atmospheric electrical discharge.

He moved to the University of Pavia in 1779, where he remained professor for the next 25 years. By 1799 he had invented what we now recognise as the forerunner of the electric battery, the voltaic pile, which produced a constant stream of electricity.

He was made a count by Napoleon in 1801 in honour of his work in the field of electricity.

Answer: Tesla

Nikola Tesla was born in Smiljan in what is now Croatia in 1856. He was educated in Graz, Austria and at the University of Prague, where he qualified as an electrical engineer. He worked as an engineer for three years, then immigrated to the United States of America in 1884.

He worked for Thomas Edison for a brief period, but soon left the post to pursue his own research. He is famous for designing the first practical system for generating and transmitting alternating current for use as electrical power.

The American rights to this invention were bought by George Westinghouse (whose name might ring a bell!), and in 1895 Tesla's alternating current motors were installed as part of the Niagara Falls power project. Tesla died in New York City in 1943 and work is currently underway to restore his Long Island Laboratory so visitors can see just how much he contributed to the field of electrical power.

Answer: Newton

Sir Isaac Newton was born in 1643 in Lincolnshire, England. He never knew his father, also named Isaac, who died only three months before his son was born. At school, early reports for young Isaac described him as "idle" and "inattentive"; his mother, who by this time had remarried, decided to withdraw Isaac from school so he could run her estate.

Unfortunately, Isaac soon demonstrated that he had no talent (or interest!) for managing an estate and was soon allowed to return to school in preparation for university, which implies that he had shown more promise in school than those early reports would suggest.

He attended Cambridge University with the aim of obtaining a law degree, but was soon drawn to mathematics when he bought a book on astrology and found he couldn't understand the mathematics in it, leading him to read more on the subject.

He graduated with his bachelor's degree in 1665 and returned home to develop the basis for differential and integral calculus. He was elected to a fellowship at Cambridge in 1667, and after gaining a master's degree, moved quickly through the ranks to become a professor in 1669.

He began research into optics, but it is for his universal theory of gravitation (which he first proposed in 1666) that he is best known and is remembered in the unit of force that bears his name.

Answer: Farad

Michael Faraday was born in England in 1791, the son of a Yorkshire blacksmith. He went to a day school, but by the age of thirteen the family finances were such that he had to leave school and find work. He was apprenticed to a bookbinder, where he not only learned to bind books, but was able to spend time reading them as well.

After finishing his apprenticeship, Faraday worked as a bookbinder for a number of years while trying to find a way to enter the world of science. He wrote letters to the eminent scientists of the day and finally got his chance when Humphrey Davy agreed to hire him as his assistant and secretary.

While Faraday's work with Davy was almost exclusively on chemistry (he succeeded in liquefying chlorine and isolating benzene), he had always had an abiding interest in electricity and in 1831 made his most important discovery, that of electromagnetic induction.

He developed a series of Christmas lectures for children through the Royal Institution in 1826; this series is still alive today and reaches a much wider audience through television, giving Faraday another legacy besides the unit of capacitance to which he gives his name.

Answer: Hertz

Born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1857, Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was educated at the University of Berlin. He was professor of physics at the technical school in Karlsruhe from 1885 to 1889 and then held the same post at the University of Bonn from 1889 until his death in 1894.

Hertz proved that electricity travels in waves at the speed of light and that these waves possessed many of the same properties of light waves themselves. The experiments he conducted to prove this theory led to the development of radio and the wireless telegraph. Between 1885 and 1889 Hertz was the first person to broadcast radio waves and also prove that light was a form of electromagnetic radiation.

His name has not only become known as the unit for frequency (the name was officially adopted in 1933), but also as a term for radio and electrical frequencies (as in kilohertz and megahertz).

Answer: Watt

Born in Greenock in 1736, James Watt had little in the way of formal schooling, but showed an aptitude for all things mechanical at an early age when he began puttering around in his father's workshop. He journeyed to London in his late teens to obtain training in instrument making and returned to Glasgow to work as an instrument maker at Glasgow University.

In 1765 he hit upon a way to improve the steam engines in use at the time, an idea that greatly improved the engine's efficiency and reduced running expenses.

He went into business with a Birmingham engineer to produce engines based on his idea and became extremely successful. Watt died in 1819 and 63 years later the British Association honoured Watt's achievements by giving his name to the unit of power.