Oliver Lodge
Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge was a British physicist and electrical engineer whose investigations into electromagnetic radiation contributed to the development of radio. He identified EMR independent of Heinrich Hertz's proof. In his 1894 Royal Institution lecture, The Work of Hertz and Some of His Successors, Lodge's demonstrations on methods to transmit and detect radio waves included an improved early radio receiver he named the coherer. His work led to him holding key patents in early radio communication, his "syntonic" patents.
Lodge became Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics at Bedford College, London, in 1879, was appointed Professor of Physics at University College Liverpool in 1881, and served as Principal of the University of Birmingham from 1900 to 1919.
Lodge was also a pioneer of spiritualism; his pseudoscientific research into life after death was a topic on which he wrote many books, including the best-selling Raymond; or, Life and Death, which detailed messages he received from a medium, which he believed came from his son who was killed in the First World War.
Early life
Oliver Joseph Lodge was born on 12 June 1851 at The Views in Penkhull, Staffordshire, and was educated at Adams Grammar School in Newport, Shropshire. His parents were Oliver Lodge —later a ball clay merchant at Wolstanton, Staffordshire—and his wife, Grace Heath. Lodge was their first child, and altogether they had eight sons and a daughter. Lodge's siblings included Sir Richard Lodge, historian; Eleanor Constance Lodge, historian and principal of Westfield College, London; and Alfred Lodge, mathematician.When Lodge was 12-years-old, the family moved house to Wolstanton. At Moreton House on the southern tip of Wolstanton Marsh, he took over a large outbuilding for his first scientific experiments during the long school holidays.
In 1865, the 14-year-old Lodge left his schooling and joined his father's business as an agent for B. Fayle & Co selling Purbeck blue clay to the pottery manufacturers. This work sometimes entailed him travelling as far as Scotland. He continued to assist his father until he reached the age of 22.
By the age of 18, Lodge's father's growing wealth had enabled him to move his family to Chatterley House, Hanley. From there Lodge attended physics lectures in London, and also attended the Wedgwood Institute in nearby Burslem. At Chatterley House, just a mile south of Etruria Hall where Wedgwood had experimented, Lodge's Autobiography recalled that "something like real experimentation" began for him around 1869. His family moved again in 1875, this time to the nearby Watlands Hall at the top of Porthill Bank between Middleport and Wolstanton.
Lodge obtained B.Sc. and D.Sc. degrees from the University of London in 1875 and 1877, respectively.
Career and research
In Wolstanton, Lodge experimented with producing a wholly new "electromagnetic light" in 1879 and 1880, paving the way for later experimental success. During this time, he also lectured at Bedford College, London. Lodge left the Potteries in 1881 to up take the post of Professor of Physics and Mathematics at the newly-established University College Liverpool.In 1900, Lodge moved from Liverpool back to the Midlands and became the first Principal of the newly-founded University of Birmingham, where he remained until his retirement in 1919. He oversaw the start of the move of the University from Edmund Street in the city centre to its present Edgbaston campus.
Electromagnetism and radio
In 1873, James Clerk Maxwell published A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, and by 1876 Lodge was studying it intently. But Lodge was fairly limited in mathematical physics, both by aptitude and training—and his first two papers were a description of a mechanism that could serve to illustrate electrical phenomena such as conduction and polarisation. Indeed, Lodge is probably best known for his advocacy and elaboration of Maxwell's aether theory, a later deprecated model postulating a wave-bearing medium filling all space. He explained his views on the aether in "Modern Views of Electricity" and continued to defend those ideas well into the twentieth century.As early as 1879, Lodge became interested in generating electromagnetic waves, something Maxwell had never considered. This interest continued throughout the 1880s, but some obstacles slowed Lodge's progress. First, he thought in terms of generating light waves with very high frequencies rather than radio waves with their much lower frequencies. Second, his good friend George Francis FitzGerald assured him that "ether waves could not be generated electromagnetically". FitzGerald later corrected his error, but by 1881 Lodge had assumed a teaching position at University College Liverpool—the demands of which limited his time and energy for research.
In 1887, the Royal Society of Arts asked 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. Lodge took the opportunity to carry out a scientific investigation, simulating lightning by discharging Leyden jars into a long length of copper wire. 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. 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, 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. In a darkened room, he also noted a glow at intervals along the wire at one half wavelength intervals. He took this as evidence that he was generating and detecting Maxwell's electromagnetic waves. While traveling on a vacation to the Tyrolean Alps in July 1888, Lodge read in a copy of Annalen der Physik that Heinrich Hertz in Germany had been conducting his own electromagnetic research, and that he had published a series of papers proving the existence of electromagnetic waves and their propagation in free space. Lodge presented his own paper on electromagnetic waves along wires in September 1888 at the British Science Association meeting in Bath, adding a postscript acknowledging Hertz's work and saying: "The whole subject of electrical radiation seems working itself out splendidly."
In the 1890s, Lodge carefully studied the aether drag hypothesis. He built increasingly elaborate "whirling machines"; a whirling machine has a flat metal disk rotating at high speeds, in the hope of dragging ether near its surface. This would then be detected by shining light through it and observing the shift in the interference patterns. He could find no evidence of any ether drag.
On 1 June 1894, during a Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution, Lodge gave a memorial lecture on the work of Hertz and the German physicist's proof of the existence of electromagnetic waves six years earlier. 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. Later in June he repeated his lecture, and on 14 August 1894 at the meeting for the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford University he was able to increase the distance of transmission up to 55 meters. Lodge used a detector called a coherer, a glass tube containing metal filings between two electrodes. When the small electrical charge from waves from an antenna were applied to the electrodes, the metal particles would cling together or "cohere" causing the device to become conductive allowing the current from a battery to pass through it. In Lodge's setup the slight impulses from the coherer were picked up by a mirror galvanometer which would deflect a beam of light being projected on it, giving a visual signal that the impulse was received. After receiving a signal the metal filings in the coherer were broken apart or "decohered" by a manually operated vibrator or by the vibrations of a bell placed on the table near by that rang every time a transmission was received. Since this was one year before Guglielmo 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, 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 Lodge's lecture was a physics experiment, not a demonstration of telegraphic signaling. Lodge would later work with Alexander Muirhead on the development of devices specifically for wireless telegraphy.
In January 1898, Lodge presented a paper on "syntonic" tuning which he received a patent for that same year. Syntonic tuning allowed specific frequencies to be used by the transmitter and receiver in a wireless communication system. The Marconi Company had a similar tuning system adding to the priority dispute over the invention of radio. When Lodge's syntonic patent was extended in 1911 for another 7 years Marconi agreed to settle the patent dispute, purchasing the syntonic patent in 1912 and giving Lodge an position as "scientific adviser".
Other works
In 1886, 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.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. He also made a major contribution to motoring when he patented a form of electric spark ignition for the internal combustion engine. Later, two of his sons developed his ideas and in 1903 founded Lodge Bros, which eventually became known as Lodge Plugs Ltd. He also made discoveries in the field of wireless transmission. In 1898, Lodge gained a patent on the moving-coil loudspeaker, utilizing a coil connected to a diaphragm, suspended in a strong magnetic field.
In political life, Lodge was an active member of the Fabian Society, and published two Fabian Tracts: Socialism & Individualism, and Public Service versus Private Expenditure, co-authored 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. In 1901, he was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.
Lodge was President of the British Association in 1912–1913. In his 1913 Presidential Address to the Association, he affirmed his belief in the persistence of the human personality after death, the possibility of communicating with disembodied intelligent beings, and the validity of the Aether theory.