Everything about Oliver Lodge totally explained
Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge,
FRS, (
June 12,
1851 -
August 22,
1940), born at
Penkhull in
Stoke-on-Trent and educated at
Adams' Grammar School, was a physicist and writer involved in the development of the
wireless telegraph. Lodge, in his
Royal Institution lectures ("
The Work of Hertz and Some of His Successors") coined the term "
coherer." He gained the "
syntonic" (or tuning) patent from the United States Patent Office in 1898. He was also credited by
Lorentz (1895) with the first published description of the
Lorentz contraction hypothesis, in 1893.
Life
Oliver Lodge was the eldest of eight sons and a daughter of Oliver Lodge (1826-1884) - later a
china clay merchant at
Wolstanton,
Staffordshire - and his wife, Grace, née Heath (1826-1879). Sir Oliver's siblings included
Sir Richard Lodge (1855-1936), historian;
Eleanor Constance Lodge (1869-1936), historian and principal of
Westfield College, London; and Alfred Lodge (1854-1937), mathematician.
Lodge obtained a Bachelor of Science degree from the
University of London in 1875 and a Doctor of Science in 1877. He was appointed professor of physics and mathematics at
University College, Liverpool in 1881. In
1900 Lodge moved from Liverpool back to the Midlands and became the first principal of the new
Birmingham University, remaining there until his retirement in
1919, overseeing the start of the move from Edmund Street in the city centre to the present
Edgbaston campus. Lodge was awarded the
Rumford Medal of the
Royal Society in 1898 and was knighted by
King Edward VII in 1902.
Lodge married Mary Fanny Alexandra Marshall in 1877. He and his wife had twelve children, six boys and six girls:
Oliver William Foster (1878 - 1955), Francis Brodie (1880 - 1967),
Alec (1881 - 1938), Lionel (1883 - 1948), Noel (1885 - 1962), Violet (1888 - 1924), Raymond (1889 - 1915), Honor (1891 - 1979), Lorna (1892 - 1987), Norah (1894 - 1990), Barbara (1896 - 1983), Rosalynde (1896 - 1983). Four of his sons went into business using Lodge's inventions. Brodie and Alec created the Lodge Plug Company, which manufactured spark plugs for cars and aeroplanes. Lionel and Noel founded a company that produced a machine for cleaning factory smoke.
Oliver, the eldest son, was a poet and author.
Before he died, Sir Oliver Lodge declared that he'd prove the existence of an
afterlife by making public appearances to the living after his death. No such appearances have been made. Lodge is buried at St. Michael’s Church,
Wilsford (Lake), Wiltshire.
Accomplishments
Lodge is notable for his work on the
aether, which had been postulated as the wave-bearing medium filling all space. He transmitted radio signals on August 14,
1894 at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford University, one year before
Marconi but one year after
Tesla. Lodge improved
Edouard Branly's coherer radio wave detector by adding a "trembler" which dislodged clumped filings, thus restoring the device's sensitivity. Lodge also carried out scientific investigations on
lightning, the source of the electromotive force in the voltaic cell,
electrolysis, and the application of
electricity to the dispersal of fog and smoke. Lodge, Oliver J (1932).
Lodge also made a major contribution to motoring when he invented electric
spark ignition for the internal combustion engine (the Lodge Igniter). Later, two of his sons developed his ideas and in 1903 founded Lodge Bros, which eventually became known as Lodge Plugs Ltd.
Besides inventing the
spark plug and wireless, Lodge also invented the moving-coil
loudspeaker, the
vacuum tube (valve) and the
variable tuner.
Lodge was an active member of the
Fabian Society and published two Fabian Tracts: Socialism & Individualism (1905) and co-authored Public Service vesus Private Expanditure with
Sidney Webb,
George Bernard Shaw and
Sidney Ball. They invited him several times to lecture at the
London School of Economics.
In 1889 Lodge was appointed President of the
Liverpool Physical Society, a position he held until 1893. The society still runs to this day, though under a student body.
Lodge is also remembered for his studies of
life after death. He first began to study psychical phenomena (chiefly
telepathy) in the late 1880s. After his son, Raymond, was killed in
World War I in 1915, Lodge visited several psychics and wrote about the experience in a number of books, including the best-selling "Raymond, or Life and Death" (1916). Altogether, he wrote more than 40 books, about the
afterlife,
aether,
relativity, and
electromagnetic theory.
Historical Records
Sir Oliver Lodge's letters and papers were divided after his death. Some were deposited at the
University of Birmingham and
University of Liverpool and others at the
Society for Psychical Research and the
University College London. Lodge was long-lived and a prolific letter writer and other letters of his survive in the personal papers of other individuals and several other Universities and other institutions. Among the known collections of his papers are the following:
- The University of Birmingham Special Collections holds over 2000 items of Sir Oliver's correspondence relating to family, co-workers at Birmingham and Liverpool Universities and also from numerous religious, political and literary figures. The collection also includes a number of Lodge's diaries, photographs and newscuttings relating to his scientific research and scripts of his published work. There are also an additional 212 letters of Sir Oliver Lodge which have been acquired over the years (1881-1939).
The University of Liverpool holds some notebooks and letters of Oliver Lodge and also has a laboratory named after him, the main administrative centre of the Physics Department where the majority of lecturers and researchers have their offices.
University College London Special Collections hold 1991 items of Sir Oliver Lodge's correspondence between 1871 and 1938.
The Society for Psychical Research holds 2710 letters written to Oliver Lodge.
Devon Records Office holds Lodge's letters to Sir Thomas Acland (1907-1908).
The University of Glasgow Library holds Sir Oliver's letters to William MacNeile Dixon (1900-1938).
The University of St Andrews has twenty-three letters from Sir Oliver to Wilfred Ward (1896-1908).
Trinity College Dublin is custodian of Lodge's correspondence with John Joly.
Imperial College, London Archives hold nineteen letters written from Sir Oliver to his fellow scientist, Sylvanus Thompson.
The London Science Museum holds an early notebook of Oliver Lodge's dated 1880, correspondence dating from 1894-1913 and a paper on atomic theory.
Publications
Lodge, Oliver Joseph, "Electric Theory of Matter
". Harper Magazine. 1904. (Oneill's Electronic Museum)
Lodge, Oliver Joseph, and Paul Tice, "Reason and Belief". Book Tree. February 2000. ISBN 1-58509-226-6
Lodge, Oliver Joseph, "The Work of Hertz and Some of His Successors", 1894
Lodge, Oliver Joseph, "RELATIVITY, A very elementary Exposition", June 11th. 1925 Paperback. Methuen & Co. LTD. London.
Lodge, Oliver Joseph, "Ether", Encyclopedia Britannica, Thirteenth Edition (1926).
Lodge, Oliver Joseph, "Modern Scientific Ideas". Benn's Sixpenny Library No. 101, 1927.
Lodge, Oliver Joseph, "The Ether of Space". ISBN 1-4021-8302-X (paperback) ISBN 1-4021-1766-3 (hardcover)
Lodge, Oliver Joseph, "Ether and Reality". ISBN 0-7661-7865-X
Lodge, Oliver Joseph, "Phantom Walls".
Lodge, Oliver Joseph, "Past Years: An Autobiography". Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932.
Notes and references
Notable Relatives
Sir Richard Lodge Historian
George Edward Lodge Artist
Eleanor Constance Lodge Historian
Carron O Lodge Artist
Francis Graham Lodge ArtistFurther Information
Get more info on 'Oliver Lodge'.
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