HERTZ ON HIS MENTOR HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ. HERTZ, HEINRICH. 1857-1894. Autograph Manuscript, a heavily annotated and corrected draft of his 1891 tribute to his mentor Hermann von Helmholtz on his 70th birthday, 12 pp total, ink on 3 bifoliate sheets, 330 x 210 mm, with 1 smaller sheet inserted, Berlin, 1891, written in ink on one-half of each page, the other half-reserved for additions and edits, heavily edited in Hertz's hand with numerous additions, deletions, and changes, with significant differences to the published work. HEINRICH HERTZ ON THE SUCCESSES AND IMPORTANCE TO SCIENCE OF HIS FORMER TEACHER AND MENTOR HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ, THE 'FATHER OF GERMAN SCIENCE.' Hermann Von Helmholtz was the most significant German scientist of the 19th-century, and Hertz, his prized pupil widely regarded as the greatest experimental scientist of the 19th century, for proving that light was an electromagnetic wave. In 1847, Helmholtz published his 'Über die Erhaltung der Kraft' ['On the Conservation of Force'] formulating the principle of the conservation of energy—perhaps the most important single development in physics of the 19th-century. Furthermore, his work was integral to two of the 'most significant developments in physics and in the philosophy of science in the 19th century: the proof that Euclidean geometry does not describe the only possible visualizable and physical space, and the shift from physics based on actions between particles at a distance to the field theory' (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Helmholtz also did important work in fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, and optics, and was much celebrated in his day for inventing the ophthalmoscope. As the director of the Institute of Physics at the University of Berlin, his students included Max Planck, Wilhelm Wien, Albert A. Michelson, and Henry Rowland, and his work forms a prelude to work from Einstein to Schrodinger. However, the most significant relationship of his scientific career was to Heinrich Hertz himself, his student at Berlin beginning in 1878, and his assistant beginning in 1880. In 1879, Von Helmholtz had offered the Berlin Prize to 'establish experimentally any relation between electromagnetic forces and the dielectric polarization of insulators,' as predicted by Maxwell's equations. Von Helmholtz encouraged Hertz to pursue the prize, but Hertz set the work aside in 1880, unable to find a mechanism to measure the experiment. However, in 1886 at Karlsruhe, still spurred by Von Helmholtz's proposition, Hertz designed and executed the series of experiments that would provide the proof for Maxwell's electromagnetic equations, and discovered the existence of radio waves ('Hertzian waves'). Although Hertz did not realize the importance of his discovery at the time, his experiments gave birth to an explosion in electromagnetic experiments that would lead to the development of radio through Marconi, and eventually television. Although Hertz's experiments contradicted his own view that forces acted instantaneously at a distance, Von Helmholtz was extraordinarily supportive of Hertz's experiments and encouraged him throughout the process. Hertz's Festschrift to Von Helmholtz was first published in a supplement to the Münchener Allgemeine Zeitung on Von Helmholtz's 70th birthday, August 31, 1891, an occasion for nationwide celebrations in Germany. This autograph draft, with its large-scale changes and emendations across eleven pages, often through several draft passages, evinces the care that the younger Hertz showed in selecting the right words to pay homage to his teacher and mentor. The manuscript covers Von Helmholtz's entire career, with the personal insight of one of his closest students. Interestingly, in Hertz's tribute he focuses a great deal on Von Helmholtz's contributions to physiology and perception, the subtle distinction between what the eye sees and the seer's mental conception of those impulses. Hertz employs the word 'image' ['Bild'] noteworthy in that Von Helmholt preferred the word sign ['Zeichen'] in this context. Hertz's interpretation of Von Helmholtz's theory of signs, which Hertz would publish in the introduction to his posthumously published 1894 Die Prinzipien der Mechanik [Principles of Mechanics], and would be referred to as Hertz's 'picture theory,' extended a profound influence on epistemology and finally Wittgenstein's own picture theory in his 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Just 3 years later in 1894, the two great German scientists would die just months apart. Probably the last thing Von Helmholtz wrote was his tribute to Hertz, 'endowed with the rarest gifts of genius and character,' in part a response to Hertz's festschrift, and published as the preface to Hertz's Prinzipien der Mechanik. The two men each made staggeringly wide-ranging contributions to scientific development, as well as the history and philosophy of science. An important scientific manuscript, this autograph draft of Hertz's paean to his mentor, the epitome of the student-mentor relationship in science, bridges the gap between two centuries of scientific progress and development. Footnotes: '... the labours of a Humboldt, the undying fame of a Gauss... [Germany] honours most the few whose names are most closely connected with the actual successes... The greatest among all these... the scientific leader of Germany, is Hermann von Helmholtz, whose seventieth birthday we celebrate to-day after he has for nearly half a century astonished the scientific world by the number, the depth, and the importance of his investigations.' - Heinrich Hertz, on Hermann Von Helmholtz, August 31, 1891. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com For further information about this lot please visit the lot listing