Lodge, Oliver Joseph (1851–1940)

British physicist. He developed a system of wireless communication in 1894, and his work was instrumental in the development of radio receivers. He also conducted experiments that suggested that the ether does not exist, a discovery fundamental to the theory of relativity. After his son was killed in 1915, Lodge became interested in psychic research. He was knighted in 1902.

Lodge was born in Staffordshire and studied at London University. He became professor of physics at the University of Liverpool on its founding 1881; in 1900, he moved to the University of Birmingham to become its first principal.

Lodge invented a coherer, a device consisting of a container packed with metal granules whose electrical resistance varies with the passage of electromagnetic radiation. Designed to detect electromagnetic waves, this was developed into a detector of radio waves in the early investigations of radio communication, with which Lodge was closely involved.

The Michelson–Morley experiments of 1881 and 1887 had failed to detect the ether that was postulated as a medium for the propagation of light waves. This result could be explained by the ether moving with the Earth, but Lodge disproved this unlikely cause 1893 in a clever experiment in which light rays were passed between two rotating discs. However he himself continued to hypothesize the existence of the ether and dismissed the results of his own experiment.