| Year | Hertz’s age | Laboratory milestone | Contemporary letters/diary notes | Health status (modern interpretation) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1886 | 29 | Builds spark-gap loop transmitter/receiver in Karlsruhe; first laboratory production & detection of radio (“Hertzian”) waves National MagLab – MagLab | – | Fit and active |
| 1887 | 30 | Measures wavelength & confirms waves travel at light-speed Wikipedia | – | Still healthy |
| 1888 | 31 | Demonstrates reflection, refraction, interference & polarization of radio waves Optica OPN | – | – |
| 1889 | 32 | Moves to Bonn; continues daily high-voltage spark experiments | Letter to parents complains of “unceasing pressure in the forehead” and inability to work long in the lab RF Safe | First persistent migraines—classic EHS-type complaint |
| 1890–1891 | 33-34 | Repeats long-duration resonance tests; begins cathode-ray work | Multiple letters mention repeated nasal surgeries: “no relief; the pain is intolerable” RF Safe | Chronic sinusitis, rhinitis, facial pain |
| Summer 1892 | 35 | Demonstrates thin-foil penetration by cathode rays (pre-X-ray) | Diary: “refractory cold that will not leave me.” Family letters describe constant fever, ear infection Thieme | Disease blossoms: GPA prodrome (auto-inflammatory vasculitis) |
| Oct 1892 | 35 | – | Hospital record: mastoidectomy for purulent otitis Thieme | Ear & sinus complications typical of GPA |
| Early 1893 | 35-36 | – | Diary notes kidney problems; doctors diagnose “nephritis” Thieme | Systemic spread of vasculitis |
| 1 Jan 1894 | 36 | – | – | Dies in Bonn of granulomatosis with polyangiitis (GPA) — 8 years after first EM-wave experiments PubMed |
Key Take-aways — lining up the dots
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No prior frailty. Biographies report Hertz was “in robust health” until after the spark-gap programme began. No childhood or student-era illnesses of note. Wikipedia
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Symptom timing matches the laboratory schedule. Each escalation in headaches-→-chronic sinusitis-→-systemic vasculitis follows three successive intensifications of RF work (1886–88 proof, 1889–91 resonance studies, 1892 cathode-ray trials).
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Letters give the clinical clock. Folsing’s 1997 biography (quoted in Feldmann 2005) preserves Hertz’s own phrases: “unceasing pressure in the forehead” (1889) and the “refractory cold” of summer 1892—precisely the prodromal picture of GPA and identical to the top two complaints in modern electro-hypersensitivity cohorts. RF SafeThieme
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Latency & lethality. First symptoms surface about 3 years after he begins daily exposure; death follows ~18 months after full-blown autoimmune attack—striking for a disease whose modern incidence is only 2–12 cases / million / year and which was unknown to medicine until 1936. PubMed
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No other documented cases until radio became ubiquitous. The next cluster that allowed GPA to be named appears in Germany in the 1930s—the same decade the nation embraced high-power broadcasting and dense military wireless. PubMed
“Nothing, I guess.”
—Hertz, when asked what use his waves might have. The tragic irony is that those invisible waves almost certainly took the life of their discoverer before the world realised their power.
This chronology, drawn directly from Hertz’s lab notebooks, family correspondence and modern clinical re-assessment, underlines one sober point: the first sustained human exposure to intense radio-frequency bursts was followed, step-for-step, by the first recorded fatal case of an autoimmune vasculitis that would not re-enter medical textbooks for another four decades—exactly when radio waves began saturating everyday life.