Cornelius Herz facts for kids
Cornelius Herz (formerly written Hertz) was born in Besançon, France on September 3, 1845, and he died in Bournemouth, England on July 6, 1898. He was a French-American doctor, electrician, businessman and famous politician of Jewish German descent, implicated in the Panama scandals.
Personal life
Cornelius's German parents, Adelaide (née Friedmann from Bavaria) and Leopold Herz, emigrated from Hesse to the United States in 1848. They settled in the State of New York and by 1853 they had all become naturalized American citizens in New York City. Cornelius entered the College of the City of New York in 1858 and in 1861 he was a lieutenant in the United States army. He graduated with honours from the College of the City of New York in 1864. With a Bachelor of Science and Master of Arts, he went to study at the Universities of Heidelberg and of Paris. After matriculating at the School of Medicine of Paris, he became surgeon-major on the staff of General Chanzy in the French army of the Loire when the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870 and was made Knight of the Legion of Honour in January 1871, for his distinguished services. In the spring of the same year he was appointed medical officer of the Maritime Hospital of Berck-sur-Mer.
In the fall of 1871 Cornelius returned to America and arrived in Chicago, where his parents were living at the time, to witness the Great Chicago Fire. He was immediately charged with a medical sanitary mission in connection with, and during, its reconstruction. In 1872, he was elected Chief Medical Officer of the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. In 1873 he married in Boston the daughter of one of his patients, Bianca Saroni, and the following year they moved to San Francisco, where he was appointed a member of the Board of Health. Here he specialized in nervous illnesses and his attention was drawn to the adaptation of electricity to practical purposes and he founded the California Electrical Works. In September 1877, with George Prescott, Thomas Edison signs an agreement with Stephen Field and Cornelius Herz regarding European quadruplex patents.
Career
In 1877 Cornelius and Bianca Saroni returned to Paris with their two infant daughters, Irma and Edna. Their son Ralph was born here, who later became a famous stage actor and three more daughters, Olga, Sybil and Adelaide. In Paris he became the head of the movement for extending the use of electricity, which had its headquarters there. He founded the Electric-Force Transmission Company under the Marcel Deprez patents.
He founded and edited the first scientific reviews on electricity, La Lumiere Electrique and the Journal d’Electricite`. At this time he also, with the most important banks of Paris, founded societies for electric lighting and for telephony in many European countries. In conjunction with the banking house of Rothschilds, the Northern Railway of France, and the Creuzot Works, he established the Society for the Construction and Maintenance of Electrical Machinery, Apparatus, Cables, etc., the Society for Brazing by Electricity, the Society for the Manufacture of a Special System of Small-bore Guns, the Society for the Application of Electric Light to Railway Trains, the Society for the Construction of Telephone Apparatus, etc. He was the originator and principal founder of the Society for Working the State Telephonic-Telegraphic Trunk Lines, with a capital of 100,000,000 francs, a gigantic scheme to interconnect the 36,000 communes of France by a perpetual day and night uninterrupted telephonic-telegraphic service, and to connect villages and the smallest hamlets at a uniform rate (names and addresses free) of one half-penny per word.”
In 1878 the Government made him Officer of the Legion of Honour. President Garfield appointed Dr. Herz an official representative of the United States Government to the International Congress of Electricians in Paris in 1881 and that same year he was raised to the rank of Commander of the Legion of Honour. In 1879 he formed the Paris Electric-Light Company and in 1880 he invented a telephone system that assured a better transmission of the voice over long distance. In 1883 Herz was the founder, along with Alphonse de Rothschild, of the American Syndicate of Electricity, which afterwards amalgamated with the Westinghouse Syndicate. In 1886, he became Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour.
Dr. Herz's whole life up to 1892 was devoted to work, to great enterprises, and to science, and his efforts in these paths were applauded by the vast majority of the members of the French Academy of Sciences, by different Governments, and by many of the world's greatest men. He received high distinctions from the Government of Bavaria, where he was made Commander of the Holy Order of St. Michael, and from King Umberto I who created him Grand Cross of the Order of St. Maurice and Lazare of Italy. He soon acquired a prominent position in the political world of France.
Tomb
The embalmed bodies of Cornelius and his father Leopold were supposed to be kept temporarily at Willesden Jewish Cemetery in London, before being taken to America, but the relocation did not happen and eventually the bodies were buried at Willesden: Leopold in section B, row R1, grave 8, on 24 August 1896; Cornelius in section K, row G, grave 3, on 11 July 1898.
