Vanity Fair cartoon.

Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge (June 12, 1851 - August 22, 1940), born at Penkhull near Stoke-on-Trent, was a physicist and writer involved 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" and gained the "syntonic" (or tuning) patent from the United States Patent Office.

He was the first person to transmit a radio signal (in 1894, one year before Marconi did so), and received international recognition for his work.

Lodge is also remembered for his work on the ether, which had been postulated as the wave-bearing medium filling all space. In 1893 he devised an experiment that helped to discredit the theory. Other scientific work included 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. He also made a major contribution to motoring when he invented electric spark ignition for the internal combustion engine. Later, two of his sons developed his ideas and founded the Lodge Plug Company.

In 1900 he 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 is also remembered for his studies of life after death. After his son, Raymond, died in World War I in 1915, he visited several psychics and wrote about the experience in a number of books. Altogether, he wrote more than 40 books, about the afterlife, aether, Relativity, and electromagnetics.

Publications

• Lodge, Oliver Joseph, "US609154 (http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=609154.WKU.&OS=PN/609154&RS=PN/609154), Electric Telegraphy". August 16, 1898.
• Lodge, Oliver Joseph, "Electric Theory of Matter (http://www.oneillselectronicmuseum.com/page40.shtml)". Harper Magazine. 1904. (Oneill's Electronic Museum)
• Lodge, Oliver Joseph, and Paul Tice, "Reason and Belief". Book Tree. February 2000. ISBN 1585092266
• Lodge, Oliver Joseph, "The Work of Hertz and Some of His Successors", 1894

External links

• "Oliver Joseph Lodge, Sir (http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/LODGE_BIO.html): 1851 - 1940". Adventures in CyberSound.
• "Sir Oliver Lodge (http://www.fst.org/lodge.htm) 1851-1940". First Spiritual Temple. 2001.
• "Lodge, Sir Oliver Joseph (http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/L/Lodge-S1i.asp)". Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2004.
• "http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/~eugeniik/history/lodge.html", containing further information on Lodge's life and work.