By Bruce J. Hunt

Early 1888, Oliver Lodge performed a series of experiments on electrical oscillations along wires that led him very close to Heinrich Hertz’s discovery, announced that same year, of electromagnetic waves in free space. Within a few years, Lodge and others began to use such waves for wireless telegraphy, laying the foundations for technologies that are now ubiquitous. On the surface this looks like a classic case of ‘applied science’, in which a laboratory discovery was turned to practical use, and in some ways it was. But on digging more deeply, we find that Lodge’s work was itself rooted in an intensely practical concern: the protection of buildings from lightning. The path from lightning protection to the discovery of electromagnetic waves, and then on to their use in telecommunications, was winding and indirect. Following this path will shed light on some important ways in which technology and science can interact.

Lodge’s work on lightning grew out of an invitation from the Society of Arts in London that he deliver two lectures on the subject as a memorial to Dr. Robert Mann, a former president of the Meteorological Society. Lodge read up on the subject, particularly the authoritative 1882 Report of the Lightning Rod Conference, and also performed experiments of his own tramadol, using tea trays to stand in for storm clouds and discharges from large Leyden jars to mimic bolts of lightning.¹ This choice of model was the key to almost all that followed, and it turned out to have some flaws—clouds, it seems, are not really much like tea trays. Simply as studies of Leyden jar discharges, however, Lodge’s experiments were valid and valuable; they shed light on several phenomena related to lightning protection, and more importantly, they led him to new discoveries about rapidly oscillating electric currents.

Many of Lodge’s experiments involved what he called ‘the alternative path’: he would arrange various conductors and insulators, connect them to his Leyden jars, charge them with an electrostatic generator, and see which path the resulting discharge followed. In the course of these experiments, he found many cases, particularly of what he called ‘impulsive rush’, that did not behave the way orthodox theories of lightning protection would have predicted. This led Lodge to criticize some of the conclusions of the Lightning Rod Conference and landed him in heated controversies with some of its defenders. Lodge also noticed some new and unexpected phenomena, particularly when he discharged the Leyden jars into pairs of long parallel wires. Not only did sparks sometimes jump between the wires, but the sparks were longest at their ends, as if the current was surging along the wires and producing a ‘recoil kick’ as it reflected off their ends. Lodge knew that Leyden jars discharges could produce oscillating currents and, partly prompted by his junior colleague A. P. Chattock, he now concluded that these were forming actual electromagnetic waves that were moving at the speed of light through the space surrounding the wires. Here, Lodge thought, was the long-sought confirmation of Maxwell’s theory of the electromagnetic field. He appended a section on these waves along wires to a paper on ‘Lightning Conductors’ that he sent off to the Philosophical Magazine in June 1888, and he set off on a hiking holiday in the Tyrolean Alps with fond hopes that his discovery would be the hit of the upcoming meeting of the British Association, set for September in Bath.² He soon found, however, that Hertz had performed even more striking experiments on electromagnetic waves in Germany, and Lodge presented his own work simply as a confirmation of Hertz’s.

Lodge continued to work on lightning protection, working with Alexander Muirhead to patent and market an arrester for use on telegraph and power lines, and in 1892 publishing a book on Lightning Conductors and Lightning Guards that brought together his previous writings on the subject.³ Eventually he and others recognized the deficiencies in his experimental model of lightning, in particular the fact that storm clouds (unlike tea trays) do not act as connected conductors, and their discharges, though very sudden, are not generally oscillatory. But while Lodge’s work on electrical discharges was rooted in the practical problem of lightning protection, its real value lay elsewhere, in the scientific evidence it provided for the existence of electromagnetic waves, and in the eventual use of those waves for wireless telegraphy. Lodge’s work on wireless telegraphy did not grow out of pure undirected scientific research, nor did it grow out of a deliberate effort to produce a wireless communications system. Instead its development followed an ‘alternative path’, starting in one technological context and ending in a quite different one, passing along the way through realms of scientific experiment and theory.

Bruce J. Hunt

¹Symons, George James, ed., Lightning Rod Conference (London: E. & FN Spon, 1882). [back]
²Oliver Lodge, ‘On the Theory of Lightning Conductors’, Philosophical Magazine, 26 (1888): 217-230. [back]
³Oliver Lodge, Lightning Conductors and Lightning Guards (London: Whittaker and Co, 1892). [back]

By Di Drummond

My paper at the third workshop explored the role that Oliver Lodge had in forming a balance between pure and applied science subjects, and between the Sciences and the Arts and Humanities, and, as a result, in laying the foundations of the University of Birmingham. Birmingham was a new form of higher education, the first civic university in England. This was characterised by the Applied Sciences, but there was a concern on the part of Birmingham’s founders for the pure sciences and, in time, the Arts and Humanities, to be included in the portfolio of subjects.

Birmingham is often seen as a product of the political networks and liberal ethos of the University’s founder, the politician and statesman Joseph Chamberlain. Certainly, his campaign was key in raising the finances the University required from amongst the local industrial and commercial elite. Chamberlain was also instrumental in developing the governing structure of the new institution. In contrast, Lodge’s role as the first Principal of the University from 1900, until his retirement in 1919, has been neglected. This paper attempts to restore Lodge’s importance. As a pure scientist who developed practical outcomes from his research while he was Professor of Physics at Liverpool, Lodge argued for the reliance of applied on pure science from the 1880s. This was key to the nature of the new university. So too was Lodge’s belief in a ‘liberal’/’liberal arts’ university education, this being seen as important in preventing scientists and those in the applied sciences from becoming too narrow and utilitarian in their attitudes. Lodge’s wider political values also proved important in the shaping of the new university. While the history of Chamberlainite municipal liberalism in the city of Birmingham was key in forming the relationship between the University and the Midland region, Lodge’s Fabianism, with its ‘municipal socialism’, had some influence in ensuring that local political and professional interests were represented in the governing system of the University of Birmingham.

Di Drummond

Registration for our fourth and final workshop is now open.  The workhop addresses some of the methodological difficulties in approaching a life such as Lodge’s, and considers how such a life might be told using the various digital tools and resources we have available today.  If features a lecture by David Amigoni; talks by Berris Charnley, Jamie Elwick, Kris Grint, Rebekah Higgitt, James Mussell, and Cassie Newland; and a keynote lecture by Bernard Lightman.  The day finishes with a public lecture, ‘Why did scientists come to write autobiographies?, by Graeme Gooday. Both workshop and public lecture will be held at Leeds Art Gallery. Further details about both the day and how to register are on the workshop page here.

By Matthew Stanley

Oliver Lodge was deeply in awe of the achievements of James Clerk Maxwell. He saw all his work as expanding the Maxwellian worldview, but he struggled with one of its most distinctive features: the mathematization of nature. Lodge acknowledged that the sophisticated mathematics involved were beyond his abilities, and developed his own nuanced understanding of the role and significance of mathematics in physics.

Lodge’s early obstacle to following Maxwell’s mathematical example was his exclusion from the Cambridge pedagogical tradition. Maxwell’s Treatise was an exceptionally difficult text, and Cambridge figures such as W.D. Niven had to work extremely hard to make sense of it and pass that that knowledge on to their students. Lodge, however, did not have access to this system and wrote that he ‘always regretted that I didn’t go through the Cambridge grind; for I am somewhat isolated from all those who did’.¹ Instead, he learned mathematics from O.M.F.E Henrici at University College London, who taught German-style projective geometry and graphical methods instead of Cambridge analysis. This visual, practical style can be easily seen in Lodge’s famous mechanical models.

Lodge greatly enjoyed mathematics and admired those who truly mastered it (including his brother Alfred, a professor of mathematics). However, he never felt that he was among that special class of people who could reason properly using only equations as a guide. This did not dampen his enthusiasm for mathematics. He was impressed with how an equation could bring together and unify scattered facts and observations, and felt that familiarity with mathematics was essential for appreciating science in an aesthetic sense. He believed that the lack of that familiarity was responsible for the dismissal of science by ordinary people. He complained about how the ‘mathematical ignorance of the average educated person has always been complete and shameless’.²

The restoril core problem, however, was less the people than it was the teachers. Lodge objected to the basic Victorian assumptions of how mathematics should be taught. For example, geometry tended to be taught through the process of memorizing Euclid and expecting a student to synthesize all the abstract propositions as one complete system. Rather that this systematic approach, Lodge said, students should be encouraged to experiment with ‘handled things’ like counters or beans and thus discover mathematical laws for themselves. This way, students would be excited by their subjective discoveries and develop an interest in the subject. Their inevitable mistakes in this process would only deepen their appreciation for the correct mathematical laws that they learned later on.

Students would come away from this teaching method with an incomplete knowledge of mathematics. Lodge was confident that this was acceptable, because the student would have developed a sense of the concrete meaning of mathematical symbols and laws (as opposed to solely considering them as abstract entities). He was deeply concerned that scientists have a correct grasp of this issue.

On one hand, a scientist might be too obsessed with the numbers associated with an equation. Lodge mocked the military engineer Sir A.G. Greenhill for demanding that formulae have every number and conversion factor explicitly written out. These sort of ‘practical men’ erred by thinking that ‘symbols express numbers, not things’. Whereas physicists like Lodge knew that ‘symbols may express things and not numbers’.³

On the other hand, someone might be dazzled by the aesthetic beauty of an equation and forget that under the abstraction was a physical concept. Careless mathematicians might hide – intentionally or not – their ignorance under an otherwise beautiful equation. This, Lodge wrote, is where Einstein went wrong. He objected that relativity reduced all the basic categories of physics to pure mathematics, and in doing so ‘leaves us in the dark as to mechanism’.⁴ That is, it gave us equations but did not explain anything. The equations were so abstract that they gave us no actual information about the world. Physics was supposed to be about modeling the world in the manner of Maxwell and Kelvin. Equations were nice to have, but they could not substitute for concrete physical meaning.

Lodge wanted a ‘full blooded’ universe.⁵ By this he meant a universe of physical sensations and conceptions based on ordinary experience, rather than solely on ‘complex mathematical machinery’.⁶ This was where he thought modern physics had failed, and Victorian physics had triumphed. Einstein had blindfolded himself with beautiful mathematics and did not realize that he had gone astray.

Lodge spent his career arguing that physics needed to have the right balance of pure xanax and concrete mathematics. No one should be surprised that Lodge held up Maxwell as the exemplar of the correct mix of physical understanding and symbolic power. Faraday did not have enough pure maths; Einstein had too much. Einstein had been entranced by aesthetic beauty as a mathematical method, rather than as something that was found at the end of a well-established theory. Models were the touchstone that allowed physicists to set up reliable equations while also preventing unchecked mathematical adventuring. Some beings of extraordinary ability could move beyond their models – as when Maxwell developed his more abstract electromagnetic system. But according to Lodge, such people were few and far between – and included neither Einstein nor himself.

Matthew Stanley

¹Oliver Lodge, Past Years (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1932), p.88. [back]
²Oliver Lodge, Easy Mathematics, Chiefly Arithmetic; Being a Collection of Hints to Teachers, Parents, Self-Taught Students and Adults, and Containing Most Things in Elementary Mathematics Useful to be Known (London: Macmillan and Co., 1906), p.viii. [back]
³Oliver Lodge, ‘The meaning of symbols in applied algebra’, Nature, 55 (1897), 246-7 (p.247). [back]
⁴Oliver Lodge, ‘The new theory of gravity’, Nineteenth Century, 86 (1919), 1189-1201 (pp.1200-1). [back]
⁵Oliver Lodge, ‘Einstein’s real achievement’, Fortnightly Review, 110 (1921), 353-372 (p.372). [back]
⁶Lodge, ‘Einstein’s real achievement’, p.370. [back]