A Pioneer of Connection: Recovering the Life and Work of Oliver Lodge

by James Mussell (Editor), Graeme Gooday (Editor)

Overview

Sir Oliver Lodge was a polymathic scientific figure who linked the Victorian Age with the Second World War, a reassuring figure of continuity across his long life and career. A physicist and spiritualist, inventor and educator, author and authority, he was one of the most famous public figures of British science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A pioneer in the invention of wireless communication and later of radio broadcasting, he was foundational for twentieth-century media technology and a tireless communicator who wrote upon and debated many of the pressing interests of the day in the sciences and far beyond. Yet since his death, Lodge has been marginalized. By uncovering the many aspects of his life and career, and the changing dynamics of scientific authority in an era of specialization, contributors to this volume reveal how figures like Lodge fell out of view as technical experts came to dominate the public understanding of science in the second half of the twentieth century. They account for why he was so greatly cherished by many of his contemporaries, examine the reasons for his eclipse, and consider what Lodge, a century on, might teach us about taking a more integrated approach to key scientific controversies of the day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822945956
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	05/26/2020
Series:	Sci & Culture in the Nineteenth Century
Edition description:	1
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

James Mussell is associate professor in Victorian literature at the University of Leeds.  He is the author of Science,Time and Space in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press and The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age. 
 
Graeme Gooday is professor of the history of science and technology, in the School of Philosophy, Religion, and History of Science at the University of Leeds. He is the author of The Morals of Measurement: Accuracy, Irony and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice, Domesticating Electricity: Technology, Uncertainty and Gender in Late Nineteenth-Century Culture, 1880-1914, and, with Stathis Arapostathis, Patently Contestable: Electrical Technologies and Inventor Identities on Trial in Britain.
 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 3

Oliver Lodge: Continuity and Communication James Mussell Graeme Gooday 3

Part 1 Lodge's Lives

1 Communication, (dis)continuities, and Cultural Contestation in Sir Oliver Lodge's Past Years David Amigoni 21

2 Becoming Sir Oliver Lodge 39

The Liverpool Years, 1881-1900 Peter Rowlands

3 Lodge in Birmingham 56

Pure and Applied Science in the New University, 1900-1914 Di Drummond

Part 2 Science and Communication

4 The Alternative Path 71

Oliver Lodge's Lightning Lectures and the Discovery of Electromagnetic Waves Bruce J. Hunt 71

5 Lodge and Mathematics 87

Counting Beans, the Meaning of Symbols, and Einstein's Blindfold Matthew Stanley

6 The Retiring Popularizer 104

Lodge, Cosmic Evolution, and the New Physics Bernard Lightman

7 The Forgotten Celebrity of Modern Physics Imogen Clarke 119

Part 3 Science, Spiritualism, and the Spaces in between

8 Glorifying Mechanism 135

Oliver Lodge and the Problems of Ether, Mind, and Matter Richard Noakes

9 The Case of Fletcher 153

Shell Shock, Spiritualism, and Oliver Lodge's Raymond Christine Ferguson

10 Beyond Raymond 167

The Theology of Spiritualism and the Changing Landscape of the Afterlife in the Church of England Georgina Byrne

11 Oliver Lodge's Ether and the Birth of British Broadcasting David Hendy 183

12 "Body Separates: Spirit Unites" 198

Oliver Lodge and the Mediating Body James Mussell

Notes 215

Bibliography 253

Contributors 281

Index 285

Editorial Reviews

This is a thorough, highly readable, and academically sophisticated account of the many facets of the career of Oliver Lodge. It affords a welcome corrective to Lodge’s marginalization, recovering his significance for a number of scientific fields as well as his importance for the development of civic universities and modern intellectual culture more generally.” —Gowan Dawson, University of Leicester


“This volume is long overdue. Oliver Lodge is one of a number of Victorian/Edwardian physicists whose reputation during their own lifetimes has not been mirrored in the attention they have received from historians. Over the last few decades he has started to reemerge as the key figure he really was in historiographies of physics and scientific culture. This excellent collection will fulfill an important role in encouraging further work on him.” —Iwan Morus, Aberystwyth University
 

“Among many other contributions, A Pioneer of Connection makes clear that it was Lodge who authored the first publication announcing the discovery of electromagnetic waves and who first published results verifying Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic radiation.” —Physics Today
 

"Given the careful textual knowledge and societal contexts each contributor provides, A Pioneer of Connection makes a case for the role that biographies can play in the history of science—one that should not be just confined to conflicts in the history of physics."
—H-Net Reviews

From the Publisher