Connecting Beyond: Oliver Lodge As A Communicator Of Science, Wednesday 8 July 2020, 10-11am (UTC+1)

We are running a live rountable session as part of the British Society for History of Science Global Digital Festival, 6-10 July 2020.

Our session is entitled ‘Connecting Beyond: Oliver Lodge As A Communicator Of Science’ and features Di Drummond, James Mussell, and Richard Noakes. Graeme Gooday will serve as chair.

The session will take place at 10am UK time (UTC+1). Anyone can join the audience and it’s free to tune in via the Festival site here. The session will also be recorded and available to watch from this link after the event.

Abstract

This session’s participants are drawn from contributors to the recently published book A Pioneer of Connection: Recovering the Life and Work of Oliver Lodge (University of Pittsburgh, 2020). The roundtable builds upon this volume and looks beyond to explore new perspectives on how far, from the 1880s to 1930s, Oliver Lodge was an effective communicator of science and a local, national and international authority figure. Each of the three contributors will give a short (7-10 minute) summary of their views (abstracts below) and then will have a discussion between them on this core theme. The last 15-20 minutes of the session will involve audience discussion around such themes as ‘what would Oliver Lodge have made of the digital era?’ and ‘what lessons for the digital era might be gleaned from Lodge’s connecting together of seemingly disparate groups and topics?’

Dr Di Drummond (Formerly Leeds Trinity University), ‘Connecting Beyond the University: Principal Oliver Lodge as a communicator of science in the West Midlands, 1900-1945’

My contribution to the book, ‘Lodge in Birmingham: Pure and Applied Science in the New University, 1900-1914’, very much focused on the role of Lodge in shaping new applied science disciplines, together with the relationship between the pure and applied sciences, in the University of Birmingham itself.  

Focusing on material from the University’s own Cadbury archives, my chapter often only provided glimpses of Lodge’s role in communicating science to various individuals and organisations of Birmingham and the West Midlands. Future research ‘Connecting beyond the University’, could elaborate on this by employing the Cadbury Archive more intensively, and by using the archive collections, and published materials, of other organisations in the region. With this a more thorough understanding of Lodge’s role in communicating science there, not just through his lectures and publications, but also by the personal and professional connections and networks he made, would be gained.

Appointed as the first principal of the new University because of his long established ‘public profile’ in communicating science to the wider world, through his popular publications, lectures etc, Lodge took science out to the people of Birmingham and its hinterland. He was concerned to communicate science to people of every social class and background. In 1903 for instance, he gave a pubic lecture in Birmingham Town Hall on Radium, repeating it for working men at a later date.

Lodge also brought the wider scientific community to Birmingham. For instance the British Association for the Advancement of Science held its  annual conference at the University 1913 when Lodge was the Association’s President. This included tours for British Association members to various industrial and commercial installations throughout the area, excursions being facilitated by many of the industrialists who constantly rubbed shoulders with Lodge at the University’s Court of Governors.

It would be very worth while closely investigating the networks and personal links that Lodge made through the governors of the University of Birmingham, and the influence that this had upon their thinking (partially traceable through Lodge’s correspondence in the University of Birmingham and University of Liverpool Archives).

Of course in tracing Lodge’s connections, and influence on scientific understanding, should go beyond the University of Birmingham. Research in the archives of other organisations in the region (e.g. The Birmingham Chamber of Commerce),  societies (The Lunar Society), and of individuals would add to this understanding. Lodge was a member of other local bodies, his spiritual beliefs, coupled with his political ones (member of the Fabian Society), brought him into contact with people of many different backgrounds and social classes. A review of how far, and in what way, Lodge shaped this local Midlands understanding of science could be made by monitoring the reactions to the lectures and talks he made in the region, and through their reportage and the correspondence in  local publications. While this would provide a vision of Lodge’s influence in communicating science immediately beyond the University of Birmingham it should be remembered that as the World’s first civic university ‘Birmingham’ received an international focus (discernible through investigation on contemporary World-Wide publications).  Some of this interest was undoubtedly the result of the fame of the University’s first Principal, Sir Oliver Lodge.

James Mussell (University of Leeds), ‘Oliver Lodge and celebrity: decoding the Mariemont visitor’s book’ 

My talk considers the visitors book kept by Oliver and Mary Lodge during their second part of his career, when they moved from Liverpool to Birmingham, and then through retirement near Salisbury.  This page, in particular, captures what I think is so interesting about the visitors book.  It’s from May to July 1915: about halfway down the page is the signature ‘Raymond Lodge’.  Raymond was the Lodge’s youngest son, then serving as a machine gun officer with the South Lancashires in Flanders.  He was home for just four days.  Six weeks later he was dead.

Dead, but perhaps not gone.  In 1916 Oliver Lodge published what is probably his best known book, Raymond: Or Life and Death.  The book records the contact Lodge may or may not have had with Raymond’s spirit, scrupulously weighing the evidence regardless of what was at stake.  This is the page of Raymond that records Raymond’s visit to Mariemont.  The simple ‘Note by O.J.L.’ stands as a counterpart to that bare signature in the visitors book, bringing the two books into dialogue.  In my talk I want to do something similar.  These two books attempt to embody the intangible by recording bodies in time and space.  Whereas Raymond attempts to establish the unity of a single life, even after death, the visitors book records many lives but, focusing on a single place, brings into view what they all have in common: a relationship with the Lodges.  Whereas Raymond, then, attempts to provide a body for Raymond’s discarnate spirit, the signatures in the book record the marks made by bodies as they visited.  For Lodge the ether was both a medium in which personality could survive death and a flexible metaphor for social relations.  The visitors book, I will argue, provides a materialised counterpoint to the ether, its signatures tangible marks of togetherness in space and time.

Richard Noakes (University of Exeter), ‘Oliver Lodge’s Ethereal Attachments’

In 1926 a humorous poem about Oliver Lodge appeared in the leading comic periodical Punch.  It declared that having found the ‘mundane’ world too ‘cramping for his style’, Lodge had strayed into the ‘psychic sphere’ which seemed to the average Fellow of the Royal Society ‘A Lodge in some vast wilderness’.  By this time Lodge agreed that his interests in psychical research had damaged his scientific reputation in some quarters – notably among fellow professional scientists. But in many other quarters Lodge was still hailed as one of the most admired British scientists of the period and had certainly not drifted into the scientific margins or “wilderness”.

Until recently historians seem to have uncritically accepted Punch’s view of Lodge’s marginality.  His beliefs in psychic phenomena and the ether of space have proven particularly important contributions to this fall from grace.  This is mainly because of assumptions that most psychic phenomena were proven fraudulent or imaginary (and so Lodge’s position was unscientific) and that most movers and shakers in physics had abandoned the ether of space in the wake of the theory of relativity.  Lodge’s apparently heterodox beliefs, as well as his voluminous output of popular scientific, philosophical and religious publications, make him a very different kind of scientist than those that historians tend to associate with the invention of modern physics – Bohr, the Curies, Einstein, Planck, Rutherford et al.

But again, when we look at individuals other than those who seemed to have made the key contributions to modern physics, Lodge appears in a very different light.  As Imogen Clark has argued, his popular books on the physics of the atom, electricity, ether and energy persuaded many twentieth century readers that he was the go-to person on ‘modern’ trends in the discipline; and Jaume Navarro has rightly emphasised that in the growing number of popular magazines for wireless professionals and amateurs, Lodge was hailed as a pioneer of the field (mainly because of his syntonic tuning invention) and actually admired for upholding the ether because this concept fitted so well within quotidian wireless practices.

Historians are now much more likely to question Lodge’s scientific marginality, not simply by appealing to his phenomenal success in communicating to many different scientific and non-scientific audiences, but by acknowledging the significant status that the ether and the study of psychic phenomena enjoyed among professional scientific workers well into the 1920s and ‘30s.  But even here there’s been a reluctance to investigate the interconnections between the many different aspects of Lodge’s work.  In my recent monograph Physics and Psychics I have tried to counter this tendency by suggesting that Lodge’s interests in psychic phenomena encouraged aspects of his more purely physical enquiries.

This is particularly clear in the cases of telepathy and telekinesis, terms coined in the 1880s when Lodge began pursuing psychical research.  Telepathy is the supposed capacity of one individual to directly receive images and other impressions in the mind of another and by the 1880s plenty of Victorians believed evidence for its existence had been established.  Telekinesis describes the movement of material bodies through spiritualist seances by some unknown force and by the 1880s many Victorians (including Lodge) believed there was enough evidence for it to justify at least further investigation.   For Lodge both telepathy and telekinesis were exciting puzzles that, as he said in 1891, the ‘orthodox scheme of physics’ couldn’t explain and which therefore represented a ‘line of possible advance’ for the ‘King of the Sciences’.  There’s no doubt that Lodge was an imperialist when it came to physics.  In 1889 he upheld the successful application of Maxwellian electromagnetic theory to optics as the ‘annexation’ of optics to the ‘imperial science’ of electricity: telepathy and telekinesis were, to one degree or another, just more exotic territories to be annexed.

One of the most puzzling features shared by telepathy and telekinesis was their mechanism.  How were images ‘transferred’ between minds?  What forces moved untouched bodies though darkened seances? Did telepathy and telekinesis represent new forms of energy?  And if so, were they mediated by the ether that Lodge and other nineteenth century physicists claimed as the ultimate seat of so many other forms of physical energy and interaction?  For Lodge and some of his followers, the possibility of an etherial theory of psychic phenomena made the ether’s nature a more urgent problem than it already was.  Experimental investigations into ether drag by Michelson and Morley in the 1880s and by Lodge in the 1890s seemed to suggest that the ether was unlike any known material substance and followed laws – electromagnetic – more fundamental than Newtonian mechanics.  For Lodge, the ether’s weirdness made it a more plausible candidate as a mechanism for psychic mediation. His ether drag experiments took place in the wake of his first exposure to telekinetic effects and his energetic pursuit of the ether’s nature clearly owed something to this psychic puzzle.

The case of Lodge would be less interesting if it was unique or relatively rare – and it would reinforce the marginal status that he once occupied in the historiography of physics.  However, in Physics and Psychics I suggested that the creative interplay between ‘physics’ and ‘psychics’ was much more widespread than we have assumed.  There’s evidence to suggest that William Crookes’s celebrated work of the 1870s on the repulsive force associated with radiation was nurtured by his contemporary study of a psychic force exuded by spiritualist mediums; that electrician Cromwell Varley’s contributions to the pre-history of the electron were driven by a spiritualist preoccupation with the apparently material properties of immaterial agents; and that British wireless engineers’ Quentin Craufurd and Cyril Frost’s 1926 design for a radio receiver was shaped by their interest in picking up signals from the afterlife.  Although these examples are from Britain in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many other instances of the ‘psychic’ roots of scientific and technical creativity will doubtless be found because so many scientists and engineers were interested in psychical investigation.  And this will certainly help rescue Lodge from the ‘wilderness’ to which he’s so often been relegated.

Just published: A Pioneer of Connection: Recovering the Life and Career of Oliver Lodge

Cover of book, A Pioneer of Connection

Our book, A Pioneer of Connection: Recovering the Life and Career of Oliver Lodge has just been published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Edited by James Mussell and Graeme Gooday, it features chapters specially commissioned from participants in the project.

Further details about the book can be found on the publisher’s website here. The table of contents is as follows:

Introduction

James Mussell and Graeme Gooday, ‘Oliver Lodge: Continuity and Communication’

Part One: Lodge’s Lives

Chapter 1
David Amigoni, ‘Communication, (Dis)Continuities, and Cultural Contestation in Sir Oliver Lodge’s Past Years

Chapter 2
Peter Rowlands, ‘Becoming Sir Oliver Lodge: The Liverpool Years, 1881–1900’

Chapter 3
Di Drummond, ‘Lodge in Birmingham: Pure and Applied Science in the New University, 1900–1914’

Part Two: Science and Communication

Chapter 4
Bruce J. Hunt, ‘The Alternative Path: Oliver Lodge’s Lightning Lectures and the Discovery of Electromagnetic Waves’

Chapter 5
Matthew Stanley, ‘Lodge and Mathematics: Counting Beans, the Meaning of Symbols, and Einstein’s Blindfold’

Chapter 6
Bernard Lightman, ‘The Retiring Popularizer: Lodge, Cosmic Evolution, and the New Physics’

Chapter 7
Imogen Clarke, ‘The Forgotten Celebrity of Modern Physics’

Part Three: Science, Spiritualism, and the Spaces In Between

Chapter 8
Richard Noakes, ‘Glorifying Mechanism: Oliver Lodge and the Problems of Ether, Mind, and Matter’

Chapter 9
Christine Ferguson, ‘The Case of Fletcher: Shell Shock, Spiritualism, and Oliver Lodge’s Raymond

Chapter 10
Georgina Byrne, ‘Beyond Raymond: The Theology of Spiritualism and the Changing Landscape of the Afterlife in the Church of England

Chapter 11
David Hendy, ‘Oliver Lodge’s Ether and the Birth of British Broadcasting’

Chapter 12
James Mussell, ‘“Body Separates: Spirit Unites”: Oliver Lodge and the Mediating Body’

Raymond: A Day of Commemoration of the Lodge Family and the First World War

As part of an event entitled ‘A Weekend of Commemoration and Hope for the Future: Stories of the First World War from Edgbaston and Ladywood’, there will be a day dedicated to Raymond Lodge at St George’s Church, Edgbaston on Saturday 19 September 2015. Details of the day are below. To download the programme for the whole weekend click here.

A Day of Commemoration of the Lodge Family and the First World War, Saturday 19th September, 2015

Our focus is on Raymond Lodge, who was killed at the age of 26 on the Somme in September 1915 and his family, including Sir Oliver Lodge, the scientist, academic and psychical investigator. The family lived opposite the church and a memorial to Raymond was placed by his parents in St George’s. There will be a seminar and exhibition of memorabilia focussing on Raymond, his family and Birmingham connections.

There will be presentations and exhibits from academic contributors and members of the Lodge family.

Programme:-

10.30: Registration, coffee and viewing of memorabilia.

11.00: Dr Jim Mussell, Associate Professor, The University of Leeds and Principal Investigator on ‘Making Waves: Oliver Lodge and the Cultures of Science, 1875-1940’ talks on “Sir Oliver Lodge in Birmingham”.

12.00: Julian Godlee, great-grandson of Oliver Lodge, sings from A E Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad set to music by Butterworth: ‘Loveliest of Trees’, ‘With Rue my Heart is Laden’, ‘The Lads in their Hundreds’, ‘In Summertime on Bredon’.

Lunch: eat out locally or bring a picnic and eat in the church or its grounds.

14.00: Nicholas Godlee, grandson of Oliver Lodge, talks on ” Raymond Lodge 1889 – 1915”.

14.30: Audio and film prepared by the Lodge family.

15.00: Julie Carter talks on “Sir Oliver Lodge; mediumship, séances and survival”

15.30: Rev Canon Dr Georgina Byrne, Worcester Cathedral talks on “Religion and Spiritualism during the First World War”. Canon Byrne is the author of Modern Spiritualism and the Church of England, 1850-1939 (2010).

Registration is free but necessary. Voluntary donations to the Church ‘Let the Stones Live’ restoration fund, with Gift Aid where appropriate, will be welcome on the day.

Please register with:- Dr S Jane Darnton, E: janedarnton@btinternet.com or T: 0121 440 7813. By Saturday 12th September, 2015.

On Sunday the 20 September, 10.30am, there will be a morning church service at which the congregation, including members of the Lodge family, will seek to commemorate and to commit themselves to the making of peace for the future and to all that makes for a strong community and society. During the memorial service we shall dedicate a Peace Garden planted by our children in the Church grounds.

Oliver Lodge: Science, Progress and the Public, Science Museum, 8 July 2015

Sir Oliver Lodge speaking on "Evolution of Character" at the Ancoats School.  Image reproduced courtesy of Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham, OJL4/9

Sir Oliver Lodge speaking on “Evolution of Character” at the Ancoats School. Image reproduced courtesy of Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham, OJL4/9


On Wednesday 8 July we will be holding a seminar on Oliver Lodge at the Science Museum. The event is titled ‘Oliver Lodge: Science, Progress and the Public’ and the speakers are:

  • Robert Bud (Science Museum), ‘”Mean streets and squalid districts”: Oliver Lodge and his contemporaries on science and progress’
  • Michael Whitworth (Merton College, Oxford), ‘Transformations of Knowledge in Oliver Lodge’s popular science writing.’

The seminar will be chaired by Christine Ferguson (Glasgow). It will take place in the Dana Centre, Science Museum, South Kensington, London, SW7 2DD, 2-4pm. For further details about the location, click here.

Registration is free, but places are limited. To book a place, email oliverlodgenetwork@gmail.com

Public Lecture: Why Did Scientists Come to Write Autobiographies?

After the workshop on the 6 March, Professor Graeme Gooday (Leeds) will give a lecture that asks ‘Why Did Scientists Come to Write Autobiographies?’.

Oliver Lodge, Past Years (London: .  Image from the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham.

Oliver Lodge, Past Years (London: . Image from the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham.

The celebrity scientist publishing a best-selling autobiography is really rather a recent thing. This lecture asks what prompted scientists increasingly to publish their own life stories in the interwar period and considers what effect this has had on who we think scientists are and should be.

The lecture is free and open to all. If you would like to attend, please email the project at oliverlodgenetwork@gmail.com.

For further details, see the event page. You can also download the poster here (pdf).

Workshop 4: Scientific Lives: Oliver Lodge and the History of Science in the Digital Age

Registration has now closed for our final workshop.  However, we have some spaces available so if you would still like to attend, email the project (oliverlodgenetwork@gmail.com) asap.

This workshop features a range of papers from people interested in life writing, the history of science, and the digital humanities. Our keynote speaker is Professor Bernard Lightman (York University, Toronto), who is speaking on Lodge and the new physics, and the workshop concludes with a public lecture from Professor Graeme Gooday, who asks ‘Why Did Scientists Come to Write Autobiographies?’. Other speakers include David Amigoni, Berris Charnley, Jamie Elwick, Kris Grint, Rebekah Higgitt, James Mussell, and Cassie Newland.

Lodge has been a difficult person to situate in both the history of science and the period more broadly. His spiritualism and strident defence of the ether meant that his scientific reputation became tarnished as he was associated with the ‘losing’ side. His long life makes him difficult to situate in terms of period: born in 1851 and dying in 1940, Lodge became seen as a Victorian who had outlived his era. This workshop asks what a life like Lodge’s reveals about our historiography and our curatorial and archival practices, while also considering how digital technology might allow us to revisit scientific lives in new ways.

The workshop will be held in the Henry Moore Room at Leeds Art Gallery, 6 March 2015.

Further details available on the workshop page.

Workshop 4: Scientific Lives: Oliver Lodge and the History of Science in the Digital Age

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.

Workshop 3: Science, Pure and Applied: Oliver Lodge, Physics, and Engineering, University of Liverpool, 31 October 2014

Registration for our third workshop – Science, Pure and Applied: Oliver Lodge, Physics, and Engineering – is now open. To register for the workshop please email us at oliverlodgenetwork@gmail.com giving us your name, institutional affiliation (if any) and letting us know of any dietary requirements you might have. Registration is free and will close on 17 October 2014.

This workshop examines the distinction between pure and applied science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, Lodge is most celebrated for his role in the development of wireless telegraphy; at the same time, however, he is remembered for his stubborn defence of the ether in the face of relativity and the new physics. His position in the university meant that he acted as spokesperson for pure research carried out by salaried academics while also representing the self-made engineer, able to turn theory into profit. This workshop will consider Lodge’s contribution to science and engineering; his attitudes to intellectual property and priority (including Lodge’s disputes with his rivals); and the trajectory of his career.

The workshop will take place in the Leggate Theatre of the University of Liverpool’s Victoria Gallery and Museum, the opening of which Lodge attended in 1892. There will be an opportunity to visit the exhibition ‘A World A Particle’; a screening of a film featuring Lodge speaking; and an opportunity to view the University of Liverpool’s Lodge material in the archives. Further details, including the full programme, are available on the workshop page.

Deadline extended! Science, Pure and Applied: Oliver Lodge, Physics, and Engineering, University of Liverpool, 31 October 2014

Last chance to participate! This workshop examines the distinction between pure and applied science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, Oliver Lodge is most celebrated for his role in the development of wireless telegraphy; at the same time, however, he is remembered for his stubborn defence of the ether in the face of relativity and the new physics. His position in the university meant that he acted as spokesperson for pure research carried out by salaried academics while also representing the self-made engineer, able to turn theory into profit. This workshop will consider Lodge’s contribution to science and engineering; his attitudes to intellectual property and priority (including Lodge’s disputes with his rivals); and the trajectory of his career. Confirmed speakers include Di Drummond, Bruce Hunt, Peter Rowlands, and Matthew Stanley.

We welcome proposals for short papers (20 mins) on any aspect of physics and engineering in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries for a panel to be held in the afternoon.

We’ve extended the deadline for proposals to 8 September 2014. Send proposals (no more than 300 words) to oliverlodgenetwork@gmail.com. Further details on the workshop page.

CFP: Science, Pure and Applied: Oliver Lodge, Physics and Engineering

We invite proposals for the third Lodge workshop, ‘Science, Pure and Applied: Oliver Lodge, Physics and Engineering’, to be held at the University of Liverpool on the 31 October 2014.

Oliver Lodge was a defender of pure science, particularly in the modern university, yet he took a keen interest in how science might be applied throughout his career, taking out patents and setting up businesses. This workshop, which will take place in the University of Liverpool’s Victoria Building, the opening of which Lodge attended in 1892, examines the distinction between pure and applied science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Speakers already confirmed include Di Drummond (Leeds Trinity), Bruce Hunt (University of Texas), Peter Rowlands (Liverpool), and Matthew Stanley (New York University).

We invite proposals for short papers (20 minutes) for a panel session at this one-day workshop. Please send proposals (no more than 300 words) to by the 1 September 2014.

This CFP is available for download here.

Further details about the workshop are available here.