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Information about Oliver Lodge

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)[1] with the first published description of the Lorentz contraction hypothesis, in 1893.[2]

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 was married 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 would 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,[3] 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.

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, "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

1. ^ Lorentz, H. A. (1895) "Michelson's Interference Experiment" (reprinted in The Principle of Relativity, Dover, 1952, page 4)
2. ^ Lodge, Oliver "Aberration Problems", Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. 184 (1893)
3. ^ Lodge, Oliver J (1932). This first broadcast demonstration by Lodge was two years before Marconi's first broadcast of 1896. In 1995 the Royal Society recognized this scientific break through at a special ceremony at Oxford University. Past Years: An Autobiography, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, page 231.

External links

Fellow of the Royal Society is an honour accorded to distinguished scientists and a category of membership of the Royal Society. Fellows are entitled to put the letters FRS after their name.

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Penkhull

Penkhull ()
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Stoke-on-Trent (often abbreviated to Stoke) is a city in Staffordshire, in the West Midlands region of England.

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wireless is normally used to refer to any type of electrical or electronic operation which is accomplished without the use of a "hard wired" connection. Wireless communication is the transfer of information
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Telegraphy (from the Greek words (τηλη) = far and (γραφειν) = write) is the long-distance transmission of written messages without physical transport of letters, originally by changing something that could
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Royal Institution of Great Britain is an organisation devoted to scientific education and research, based in London. It was founded in 1799 by the leading British scientists of the age, including Henry Cavendish and its first president, George Finch, the 9th Earl of Winchilsea, for
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Heinrich Rudolf Hertz

Born January 22 1857(1857--)
Hamburg, Germany
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The coherer is a primitive form of radio signal detector, used in the late 19th century, consisting of a capsule of metal filings in the space, sometimes evacuated, between two electrodes.
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Tuner may refer to:
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  • Tuner (electronics) a module or device which converts low-amplitude radio-frequency signals into a form suitable for processing by further modules or

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Hendrik Antoon Lorentz

Painting of Hendrik Lorentz by Menso Kamerlingh Onnes
Born July 18 1853(1853--)
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Length contraction, according to the special theory of relativity, which was formulated in the early twentieth century through the seminal work of Einstein, Poincaré and Lorentz, is the physical phenomenon of a decrease in length detected by an observer in objects that travel at
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Kaolinite is a clay mineral with the chemical composition Al2Si2O5(OH)4. It is a layered silicate mineral, with one tetrahedral sheet linked through oxygen atoms to one octahedral sheet of alumina octahedra.
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Wolstanton ()

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Sir Richard Lodge was born on 20 June 1855 at Penkhull, Staffordshire. He was Professor of History at Glasgow University from 1894-1899 and then Professor of History at Edinburgh University from 1899 to 1925.
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Eleanor Constance Lodge, CBE, was born on 18 September 1869 at Hanley, Staffordshire. She was Vice-Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford from 1890 to 1921 and then Principal of Westfield College, Hampstead, in the University of London from 1921 to 1931.
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Westfield College was a small college situated in Hampstead, London, England that was a constituent college of the University of London from 1882 until 1989. For most of its existence, it only admitted women as students.
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University of London is a university based primarily in London. It is the second-largest university in the United Kingdom (after the Open University), with 135,090 campus-based students and over 40,000 in the University of London External Programme.
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University of Liverpool is a university in the city of Liverpool, England.

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University of Birmingham is an English university in the city of Birmingham.

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Edgbaston is an area in the city of Birmingham in England. It is also a formal district, managed by its own district committee.

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Rumford Medal; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences awards the Rumford Prize.

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Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, known simply as The Royal Society, is a learned society for science that was founded in 1660 and claims to be the oldest such society still in existence.
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