Oliver Lodge

Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge was an English physicist and electrical engineer, born in Penkhull, Staffordshire, in 1851, whose studies of electromagnetic radiation contributed to the development of radio. In his 1894 Royal Institution lecture on the work of Hertz he demonstrated ways to transmit and detect radio waves, including an improved receiver he named the coherer, and his syntonic tuning patents were key patents in early radio. He was appointed Professor of Physics and Mathematics at University College Liverpool in 1881 and was first Principal of the University of Birmingham from 1900 to 1919. He was also a pioneer of spiritualism and wrote the best-selling book Raymond about messages he believed came from his dead son.