text: He was born to Vinzenz Hess and Serafine Edle von Grossbauer-Waldstätt, in Waldstein Castle, near Peggau in Styria, Austria, on 24 June 1883. His father was a royal forester in Prince Louis of Oettingen-Wallerstein's service. He attended secondary school at Graz Gymnasium from 1893 to 1901.
  From 1901 to 1905, Hess was an undergraduate student at the University of Graz. In 1910, Hess received his PhD from the University of Vienna. He worked as Assistant under Stefan Meyer at the Institute for Radium Research, Viennese Academy of Sciences, from 1910 to 1920.
  In 1920, he married Marie Bertha Warner Breisky.
  Hess took a leave of absence in 1921 and travelled to the United States, working at the United States Radium Corporation, in New Jersey, and as consulting physicist for the US Bureau of Mines, in Washington, D.C. In 1923, he returned to the University of Graz, and was appointed the ordinary professor of experimental physics in 1925. The University of Innsbruck appointed him professor, and director of the Institute of Radiology, in 1931.
  Hess relocated to the United States with his Jewish wife in 1938, in order to escape Nazi persecution. The same year Fordham University appointed him professor of physics, and he later became a naturalized United States citizen in 1944. His wife died of cancer in 1955. The same year he married Elizabeth M. Hoenke, the woman who nursed Berta at the end of her life.
  He was a practicing Roman Catholic, and in 1946, he wrote on the topic of the relationship between science and religion in his article "My Faith", in which he explained why he believed in God. He retired from Fordham University in 1958 and he died on 17 December 1964, in Mount Vernon, New York from Parkinson's disease.