 Hertz’s experiments and their consequences finally laid to rest the disputes between Helmholtz and Wilhelm Weber. Among those consequences was the death of Helmholtz’s view that electromagnetism is a kind of action at a distance, and the replacement of the action at a distance view with a field theory, “one of the major turning points in the history of physics” (Heidelberger 1998, 9). Since Hertz revealed empirical evidence for the existence of electromagnetic waves, “the sources of the electrodynamic effect are not anymore to be sought in agents that are hidden from our view but in the surrounding medium” (Heidelberger 1998, 17). While Helmholtz supported Maxwell’s view that electromagnetism was a wave in the ether, Helmholtz explained wave propagation by means of action at a distance. Hertz demonstrated that electromagnetic waves were perturbations in a medium, which at the time was thought to be the ether, and which later was re-conceived as a field. More importantly, Hertz explained the propagation of electromagnetic waves directly “from the interactions themselves,” based on his empirical data, and thus did not need to appeal to actions at a distance (Buchwald 1994, 265ff).