Oliver Lodge

Oliver Lodge
Born
Oliver Joseph Lodge

(1851-06-12)12 June 1851
Died22 August 1940(1940-08-22) (aged 89)
Alma materUniversity of London (BSc, DSc)
Known for
Spouse
Mary Fanny Alexander Marshall
(m. 1877; died 1929)
Children12, including Oliver and Alexander
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsPhysics
InstitutionsUniversity College Liverpool

Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge FRS[1] (12 June 1851 – 22 August 1940) was an English physicist and a pioneer of radio. He identified electromagnetic radiation independent of Hertz's proof and at his 1894 Royal Institution lectures ("The Work of Hertz and Some of His Successors"), Lodge demonstrated an early radio wave detector he named the "coherer". In 1898 he was awarded the "syntonic" (or tuning) patent by the United States Patent Office. Lodge was Principal of the University of Birmingham from 1900 to 1920.

Lodge was also 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 (1916), which detailed messages he received from a medium, which he believed came from his son who was killed in the First World War.

  1. ^ Gregory, R. A.; Ferguson, A. (1941). "Oliver Joseph Lodge. 1851-1940". Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society. 3 (10): 550. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1941.0022. S2CID 154552517.