He might have won the very first Nobel Prize, had he not passed away just a few years prior, and much too young, wasn't he in his late-30s or early-40s?

In fact, I believe that had Hertz remained alive and won his prize, the Nobel Committee would not have felt obliged to give it to Marconi a few years later.

Marconi was a back-stabbing asshole who became one of the wealthiest men in the world by abusing the gentlemanly trust of others, and coasting on someone else's technology - particularly the way crystals oscillate, and some of them serve nicely as a sort of "translation point" between electromagnetic waves and the physical apparatus that transmits and/or receives the signal.