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The Morning GIF: Google honors Hertz

On the occasion of his 155th birthday, Google release a charming, electromagnetic tribute to inventor Heinrich Hertz.

 

Lorraine Murphy

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Posted on Feb 22, 2012   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 9:05 pm CDT

Here at the Daily Dot, we have an unofficial tradition of sharing GIF images with each other every morning. Now we’re looping you into the circle. In the Morning GIF, we feature a popular—or just plain cool—GIF we found on Reddit, Canvas, or elsewhere on the Internet.

Let us all take a moment in our wireless lives to celebrate the birth of Heinrich Hertz, the man who proved the existence of electromagnetic waves, thus ultimately giving birth to the wireless industry (and radio, and television, and iPhones, and so on).

Without him, our lives would be a sorry tangle of cable macrame, and our portable devices would be portable no farther than the nearest open electrical outlet. We would never have loved Lucy or hated Marcia, watched the Berlin Wall fall, or have known what rockabilly sounded like.

To mark his 155th birthday, Google’s design team has come up with their least legible but possibly most attractive doodle yet: a somewhat eccentric electromagnetic wave GIF in the Google colors. It was uploaded to Tumblr, first by the SoapboxSchtick, and has only 46 notes at the time of writing.

Watch it on the wireless device of your choice for full, Hertz-honoring effect.

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*First Published: Feb 22, 2012, 11:15 am CST