A science-y Google doodle today - happy birthday Heinrich Rudolph Hertz

Google is doing its bit for science again by highlighting the work of Heinrich Rudolph Hertz as an animated Google doodle today:

Not sure I've ever seen a sine wave that looks like that, but it's the sentiment that counts.

So in keeping with that sentiment, who was this Mr Hertz that he has a whole unit of measurement named after him?

Encyclopaedia Brittanica describes him thus:

Ah the comb-over...
http://www.sciencephoto.com/image/225652
/large/H4080072-Portrait_of_Heinrich_Hertz-SPL.jpg

Heinrich Hertz,  (born Feb. 22, 1857, Hamburg—died Jan. 1, 1894, Bonn), German physicist who was the first to broadcast and receive radio waves.

He received his Ph.D. magna cum laude from the University of Berlin in 1880, where he studied under Hermann von Helmholtz. In 1883 he began his studies of the electromagnetic theory of James Clerk Maxwell. Between 1885 and 1889, while he was professor of physics at the Karlsruhe Polytechnic, he produced electromagnetic waves in the laboratory and measured their length and velocity. He showed that the nature of their vibration and their susceptibility to reflection and refraction were the same as those of light and heat waves.

As a result he established beyond any doubt that light and heat are electromagnetic radiations. In 1889 Hertz was appointed professor of physics at the University of Bonn, where he continued his research on the discharge of electricity in rarefied gases.

His scientific papers were translated into English and published in three volumes: Electric Waves (1893), Miscellaneous Papers (1896), and Principles of Mechanics (1899).

And what is this measure called hertz? Wikipedia tells us:

One hertz simply means "one cycle per second" (typically that which is being counted is a complete cycle); 100 Hz means "one hundred cycles per second", and so on. The unit may be applied to any periodic event—for example, a clock might be said to tick at 1 Hz, or a human heart might be said to beat at 1.2 Hz. The "frequency" (activity) of aperiodic or stochastic events, such as radioactive decay, is expressed in becquerels.

As an SI unit, Hz can be prefixed; commonly used multiples are kHz (kilohertz, 103 Hz), MHz (megahertz, 106 Hz), GHz (gigahertz, 109 Hz) and THz (terahertz, 1012 Hz). 

Oh - the birthday? He'd be 155 today. If he'd also invented eternal life. But guess that wasn't his field...