'Professor of Physics, University College, Liverpool which was subsequently named after him. Honorable member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers. Lodge was a pioneer in wireless telegraphy and actually sent a radio message one year before Marconi.'<blockquote>
Oliver Lodge 1851-1940
STUDIED AT the Royal College of Science and at University College. Achieved his DS.c in 1877 and by 1881 he was Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Liverpool.
In 1884 he joined the SPR, not because he liked the subject of psychical research but - as he notes in his autobiography - because he had 'found a series of facts that were unpalatable and mainly neglected by scientific men, and felt them worthy of attention'. Also contributed to the popular scientific magazine
Nature.
He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1887. In 1900 he accepted an offer to become first Principal of Birmingham University, and shaped its course until he retired in 1919. He had stipulated that he must be allowed to continue his work in psychical research.
He was later knighted in 1902, when he had already served for a year as President of the SPR. Became President of the British Association in 1913.
He first became convinced of survival after extensive examination of
Leonora Piper's remarkable phenomena in 1889.
Professor of Physics, University College, Liverpool which was subsequently named after him. Honorable member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers. Lodge was a pioneer in wireless telegraphy and actually sent a radio message one year before Marconi.
President of the Physical Society, the British Association, the Rontgen Society, and SPR (from 1901 to 1903) and then again with
Mrs. Eleanor Sidgwick in 1932 as Joint Presidents of Honour.
Source (with minor modifications): An Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science by Nandor Fodor (1934).</blockquote>
'...a treatment which is well calculated to replace the old materialistic view that man had only a material body ... A modern theory which seeks to provide the emancipated spirit with any kind of organism related to the physical world might thus be ranked as a return to a modified form of materialism ... yet popular ignorance of what is meant by the Ether, and of the certain fact that the Ether is a part of the physical Universe and has definite properties which can be experimented on and ascertained, may well suggest all manner of difficulties in understanding the hypothesis I am trying to expound.'<blockquote>'WHEN we consider the question or Survival from the physical point of view we are up against the ancient problem of the connection between mind and body. The body is certainly made of matter, but matter is inert, it never does anything, it is completely controlled by the forces acting upon it...
...
A supplementary and semi-physical treatment of Survival is now becoming possible ; a treatment which is well calculated to replace the old materialistic view that man had only a material body, and that when that body died and decayed, the animation, the personality, and the individual, necessarily ceased to exist. It is also well calculated to replace the popular idealistic notion that any spirit which survives the death of the material body must survive in an entirely disembodied condition, and be out of relationship with the physical Universe. Many people suppose that it then belongs to another order of existence, or, as some would say, of non-existence ; that it is likely to be free from any relationship even with Space and Time, and must have departed entirely out of our ken ; so that communication or intercourse with it is no longer possible, until perhaps at some future day when the material body shall have been somehow resuscitated and restored to its old function, in glorified form, so that the spirit can resume its active control. That this superstitious idea has been prevalent is testified to by popular modes of expression, such as :
<blockquote>'On the Resurrection morning, all their dead the graves restore. Father, mother, sister, brother meet once more.'</blockquote>
This depressing notion of future existence - if it can be called existence in the interim - is not a scientific or psychological view at all ; but it has been the religious, or at least the ecclesiastical, view through medieval times ; hymns and liturgies are saturated with it, and it continues to this day the chief representation of what, by strictly orthodox people, is meant by Survival.
A modern theory which seeks to provide the emancipated spirit with any kind of organism related to the physical world might thus be ranked as a return to a modified form of materialism. For though, when properly understood, the view I advocate ought to emancipate us from materialistic bugbears, and although it wholly condemns the idea that flesh and blood or any particles of terrestrial matter are revivified and inherit Eternal Life, yet popular ignorance of what is meant by the Ether, and of the certain fact that the Ether is a part of the physical Universe and has definite properties which can be experimented on and ascertained, may well suggest all manner of difficulties in understanding the hypothesis I am trying to expound. Wherefore it will probably be considered unsatisfactory, both by the scientific materialist and by the theologian; possibly also by some spiritualists.'
- Oliver Lodge,
The Mode of Future Existence</blockquote>