Life And Matter

Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge, FRS (1851-1940), was a physicist and writer involved in the development of the wireless telegraph. He invented electric spark ignition for the internal combustion engine (the Lodge Igniter), the moving-coil loudspeaker, the vacuum tube (valve) and the variable tuner. In his Royal Institution lectures The Work of Hertz and Some of His Successors (1894) he coined the term â??cohererâ? and was credited by Lorentz (1895) with the first published description of the Length contraction hypothesis, in Aberration Problems (1893). He gained the â??syntonicâ? (or tuning) patent from the United States Patent Office in 1898. He is also remembered for his studies of life after death. After his son, Raymond, was killed in World War I in 1915, Lodge visited several psychics and wrote about the experience in a number of books, including the best-selling Raymond; or, Life and Death (1916). Altogether, he wrote more than 40 books, about the afterlife, aether, relativity, and el