Hertz was born in Hamburg, Germany, to Gustav Ferdinand Hertz, whose father converted from Judaism to Lutheranism and married into a Lutheran family, and Anna Elisabeth Pfefferkorn, herself a Lutheran.
Hertz had always had a deep interest in meteorology probably derived from his contacts with Willhelm von Bezold (he was Hertz's professor in a laboratory course at the Munich Polytechnic in the summer of 1878).
Hertz, however, did not contribute much to the field himself except for some early articles as an assistant to Helmholtz in Berlin, including research on the evaporation of liquids, a new kind of hygrometer, and a graphical means of determining the properties of moist air when subjected to adiabatic changes.
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