47 Facts About Oliver Lodge

Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge, was a British physicist and writer involved in the development of, and holder of key patents for, radio.

Oliver Lodge identified electromagnetic radiation independent of Hertz's proof and at his 1894 Royal Institution lectures, Lodge demonstrated an early radio wave detector he named the "coherer".

Oliver Lodge was their first child, and altogether they had eight sons and a daughter.

When Oliver Lodge was 12, the family moved house a short distance north along the valley ridge, to Wolstanton.

Oliver Lodge continued to assist his father until he reached the age of 22.

Oliver Lodge's father's growing wealth from trade enabled him to move the family to Chatterley House, Hanley, when Lodge was 18.

At Chatterley House, just a mile south of Etruria Hall where Wedgwood had experimented, Oliver Lodge's Autobiography recalled that "something like real experimentation" began for him around 1869.

Oliver Lodge obtained a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of London in 1875 and gained the title of Doctor of Science in 1877.

Oliver Lodge left the Potteries district in 1881, to take the post of Professor of Physics and Mathematics at the newly founded University College, Liverpool.

In 1900 Oliver 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.

Oliver Lodge oversaw the start of the move of the university from Edmund Street in the city centre to its present Edgbaston campus.

Oliver Lodge was awarded the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society in 1898, and was knighted in the 1902 Coronation Honours, receiving the accolade from King Edward VII at Buckingham Palace on 24 October that year.

Oliver Lodge married Mary Fanny Alexander Marshall at St George's Church, Newcastle-under-Lyme in 1877.

In 1873 J C Maxwell published A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, and by 1876 Lodge was studying it intently.

Oliver Lodge explained his views on the aether in "Modern Views of Electricity" and continued to defend those ideas well into the twentieth century.

In 1887 the Royal Society of Arts asked Oliver Lodge to give a series of lectures on lightning, including why lightning rods and their conducting copper cable sometimes do not work, with lightning strikes following alternate paths, going through structures, instead of being conducted by the cables.

Oliver Lodge took the opportunity to carry out a scientific investigation, simulating lightning by discharging Leyden jars into a long length of copper wire.

Oliver Lodge found the charge would take a shorter high resistance route jumping a spark gap, instead of taking a longer low resistance route through a loop of copper wire.

Oliver Lodge presented these first results, showing what he thought was the effect of inductance on the path lightning would take, in his May 1888 lecture.

In other experiments that spring and summer, Oliver Lodge put a series of spark gaps along two 29 meter long wires and noticed he was getting a very large spark in the gap near the end of the wires, which seemed to be consistent with the oscillation wavelength produced by the Leyden jar meeting with the wave being reflected at the end of the wire.

Oliver Lodge took this as evidence that he was generating and detecting Maxwell's electromagnetic waves.

On 1 June 1894, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford University, Oliver Lodge gave a memorial lecture on the work of Hertz and the German physicist's proof of the existence of electromagnetic waves 6 years earlier.

Oliver Lodge set up a demonstration on the quasi optical nature of "Hertzian waves" and demonstrated their similarity to light and vision including reflection and transmission.

Oliver Lodge used a detector called a coherer, a glass tube containing metal filings between two electrodes.

Since this was one year before Marconi's 1895 demonstration of a system for radio wireless telegraphy and contained many of the basic elements that would be used in Marconi's later wireless systems, Oliver Lodge's lecture became the focus of priority disputes with the Marconi Company a little over a decade later over invention of wireless telegraphy.

At the time of the dispute some, including the physicist John Ambrose Fleming, pointed out that Oliver Lodge's lecture was a physics experiment, not a demonstration of telegraphic signaling.

In January 1898 Oliver Lodge presented a paper on "syntonic" tuning which he received a patent for that same year.

In 1886 Oliver Lodge developed the moving boundary method for the measurement in solution of an ion transport number, which is the fraction of electric current carried by a given ionic species.

Oliver Lodge carried out scientific investigations on the source of the electromotive force in the Voltaic cell, electrolysis, and the application of electricity to the dispersal of fog and smoke.

Oliver Lodge made a major contribution to motoring when he patented a form of electric spark ignition for the internal combustion engine.

Oliver Lodge made discoveries in the field of wireless transmission.

In 1898, Oliver Lodge gained a patent on the moving-coil loudspeaker, utilizing a coil connected to a diaphragm, suspended in a strong magnetic field.

In 1889 Oliver Lodge was appointed President of the Liverpool Physical Society, a position he held until 1893.

Oliver Lodge began to study psychical phenomena in the late 1880s, was a member of The Ghost Club, and served as president of the London-based Society for Psychical Research from 1901 to 1903.

Oliver Lodge was a friend of Arthur Conan Doyle, who lost a son in World War I and was a Spiritualist.

Oliver Lodge was convinced that his son Raymond had communicated with him and the book is a description of his son's experiences in the spirit world.

Walter Cook wrote a rebuttal to Oliver Lodge, titled Reflections on Raymond, that directly challenged Oliver Lodge's beliefs in Spiritualism.

Oliver Lodge came to believe that the spirit world existed in the ether.

Oliver Lodge lectured on theistic evolution at the Charing Cross Hospital and at Christ Church, Westminster.

Oliver Lodge's lectures were published in a book Evolution and Creation.

Edward Clodd criticized Oliver Lodge as being an incompetent researcher to detect fraud and claimed his Spiritualist beliefs were based on magical thinking and primitive superstition.

Oliver Lodge who was present in the audience was duped by the trick and claimed that Devant had used psychic powers.

Oliver Lodge had endorsed a clairvoyant medium known as "Annie Brittain".

Oliver Lodge was arrested and convicted for fraudulent fortune telling.

Lodge is commemorated in Liverpool with a bronze figure entitled Education, at the base of the Queen Victoria Monument and the Oliver Lodge Building which houses the physics department of the University of Liverpool.

Oliver 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.

Oliver Lodge wrote more than 40 books, about the afterlife, aether, relativity, and electromagnetic theory.