Sir Oliver Lodge

Life and Matter: a Criticism of Professor Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe (Dodo Press) Sir Oliver Lodge

Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge, FRS (1851-1940), was a physicist and writer involved in the development of the wireless telegraph. He invented electric spark ignition for the internal combustion engine (the Lodge Igniter), the moving-coil loudspeaker, the vacuum tube (valve) and the variable tuner. In his Royal Institution lectures The Work of Hertz and Some of His Successors (1894) he coined the term “coherer†and was credited by Lorentz (1895) with the first published description of the Length contraction hypothesis, in Aberration Problems (1893). He gained the “syntonic†(or tuning) patent from the United States Patent Office in 1898. He is also remembered for his studies of life after death. 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. His works include: Life and Matter (1905), Socialism & Individualism (1905), The Immortality of the Soul (1908) and The Survival of Man (1909).