How did Henrich Hertz measure UHF waves?

[DragonPetter]

I've been reading about the history of the verification of maxwell's theory, and I'm a bit confused how people in those times could measure such high frequencies. I imagined they used instruments that were much more mechanical, and so I'm not sure how they could know or measure things that happen millions of times a second.

 

[DragonPetter]

Does anyone know anything about this? I downloaded his original book "Electric Waves" by Heinrich Hertz, but I haven't had time to go through it yet.

I just am curious how they could have concepts of millions of times a second or even thousands of times a second, when nothing in their world would be obvious that things happen that fast except qualitatively, and I know they did not have printers or oscilliscope screens to show graphs of things happening so fast.

 

[DragonPetter]

I just have thought that if they can have a standing wave, or somehow measure the wavelength, and they have been able to approximate the speed of light, then it works out to having a very high frequency. Was it this simple that they measured wavelengths in meters and then combined that with their knowledge of general waves and the first experiments on the speed of light?

 

[rollcast]

http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~jones/cscie129/nu_lectures/lecture6/hertz/Hertz_exp.html

I think this is the experiment he used.