Heinrich Hertz, the man after which hertz units were named.

Hertz, is a company which rents out cars, but the hertz I will talk about is the unit of frequency. Frequency is defined as a number of cycles per unit time, meaning the number of times an event repeats in a given amount of time. When we say one hertz, we mean that an event was repeated once in one second. The abbreviation for hertz is Hz. We always use one second as the amount of time.
Hertz was named after a German physicist named Heinrich Rudolf Hertz. Heinrich was the first to demonstrate satisfactorily the existence of electromagnetic waves. He did this by building a machine that could produce and detect radio waves. The name was proposed in the late 1920′s by German scientists in honour Heinrich. It replaced the previous name, cycles per second (cps), in 1933.

Hertz is used for many things. It is mostly used for radio and audio waves. It also occurs in alternating current. However, it can also be applied to any event. For example, a clock ticks at one hertz, one cycle per second.

This SI unit (abbreviation for International System of Units) was named after a person. As with all other SI units named after proper nouns, the first letter of the symbol is uppercase (Hz). However, when an SI unit is spelled out, it should always begin in lowercase, unless it begins a sentence or has another grammar rule to force it into uppercase (hertz).

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