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Google doodle celebrates scientist Heinrich Hertz's birthday

By Charlie Szold, USA TODAY

Happy birthday Heinrich Hertz!

Google is celebrating Hertz, who proved that electricity travels in waves, with an animated doodle for his 155th birthday.

Hertz used a rudimentary transmitter and receiver to prove physicist James Maxwell's theory that electricity, light and magnetism were all connected and traveled in waves, according to an account of his experiment by the Christian Science Monitor. Radio, television and countless other modern technologies are based on Hertz's experiment.

At the time, however, Hertz thought his experiment useless.

"It's of no use whatsoever," he said. "This is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right, we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there."

PHOTOS:  Google doodles through the years

The doodle itself is an animated .gif that (if you squint hard enough) spells Google. It was designed by Sophia Foster-Dimino, a cartoonist and illustrator on the Google Doodle team.

Foster-Dimino told the Washington Post's Comic Riffs blog that she wanted the doodle to be an "elegant homage" to Hertz.

"So extensive were his experiments that there's a unit of frequency, the hertz, named for him — hence our wavy Doodle," she said.

Hertz was born on Feb. 22, 1857 in Hamburg, Germany. He died in 1894 at just 36 years old.

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