Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1847-1894) was the first to broadcast and receive radio waves. Maxwell's theory had been based on unusual mechanical ideas about the ether and had not been universally accepted. In 1884, Hertz rederived Maxwell's equations by a new method, casting them in modern form. Then, between 1885 and 1889, as a professor of physics at Karlsruhe Polytechnic, he produced electromagnetic waves in the laboratory and measured their wavelength and velocity. He showed that the nature of their reflection and refraction was the same as those of light, confirming that light waves are electromagnetic radiation obeying the Maxwell equations.