George Francis FitzGerald

Born on 3 August 1851 in Dublin, Ireland, George Francis FitzGerald was a physicist who correctly predicted significant phenomena in electromagnetism and what would come to be known as relativity. FitzGerald studied Maxwell’s equations on electricity and magnetism and predicted in 1883 that an oscillating electric current would produce electromagnetic waves. Five years later Heinrich Hertz proved FitzGerald correct by producing radio waves. FitzGerald also paid close attention to the experiment by Michelson and Morley that failed to detect evidence of the ether, the substance that many scientists thought was necessary to carry light waves. Based on those results, FitzGerald proposed in 1892 that a measurement of the length of an object in motion would be smaller than one of the same object at rest. Hendrik Lorentz proposed a similar idea three years later. Although FitzGerald’s explanation for the phenomenon was wrong, that length contraction, often called Lorentz contraction or Lorentz–FitzGerald contraction, ultimately became a crucial part of Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

Date in History: 3 August 1851