OBITUARY NOTICES
The same aunt guided his education in the years when he had
left school and entered his father’s business. She invited him to
stay w ith her in London when he was about fifteen years o f age;
and while w ith her he attended lectures in chemistry and in
geology. He was given a ticket to six lectures on heat by Professor
Tyndall whose powers o f exposition and experimental skill im
pressed him so much that he attended every lecture by Tyndall
at the Royal Institution for which he could obtain a tickets
W hen he returned to the Potteries after this studious winter,
he was eager for more knowledge and began to make experi
ments for himself whenever his business occupations permitted
o f interruption.
About this time, the Science and Art Department started classes
at the W edgw ood Institute, Burslem; and a well-known teacher
under the Department, M r John Angell, o f Manchester, gave a
course in chemistry. Lodge attended this course and became a
kind o f voluntary laboratory assistant to M r Angell for the
course. Lodge afterwards attended classes in physics, mathematics
and other subjects at the W edgw ood Institute, and used whatever
intervals he could snatch from his business occupations for reading
what he could about them. He entered for eight o f these subjects
in the May examinations o f the Science and Art Department
and obtained a First Class in all o f them. The result was that he
was selected by the Department to attend a winter course for
science teachers in training at the Royal College o f Science,
South Kensington, with free tuition and a maintenance grant.
He attended lectures there by Huxley, but worked chiefly at
chemistry and physics under Edward Frankland and Frederick
Guthrie. In addition, he attended lectures in mathematics,
mechanics and physics at King’s College.
W hile in his father’s business, Lodge passed the London
Matriculation examination and began to w ork for the Intermedi
ate B.Sc. During the winter in London as a science teacher in
training, he attended lectures in botany at University College, by
Professor Oliver and had private tuition in zoology, with the result
that he passed the examination in 1873. He then decided to give
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up the idea o f a commercial career and entered University College,
London, as a student. W hile there, the professor o f physics,
Carey Foster, after interviewing Lodge, offered him a salary o f
a year to assist in taking exercise classes and in the laboratory.
Lodge gladly accepted this opportunity o f cutting his business
ties and achieving independence, even though such independence
involved materially straitened circumstances. He was able to
pass the Final B.Sc. examination in 1875, and two years later
took electricity for the D.Sc. examination which he passed
w ithout any difficulty. In after life, Lodge remarked, ‘O f all the
examinations, I found Matriculation the hardest’.
W hen Lodge entered University College he intended to w ork
under the two great professors o f mathematics there—Olaus
Henrici and W . K. Clifford—with the view o f going to
Cambridge. The offer o f Carey Foster changed the course o f
his career. From demonstrator in physics he became assistant
professor and remained at University College until 1881 when he
was appointed professor o f physics and mathematics at University
College, Liverpool, where he did most o f his experimental w ork
in physics.
W ith the close o f the nineteenth century, Lodge embarked
on a new career. The century had witnessed an unexampled
growth in the movement for higher education. In 1832
Durham, and in 1836 London, had received university
charters; university colleges were established in most o f the
great cities o f England and Wales; the last quarter o f the century
saw the initiation o f the great federal experiments o f the Victoria
University and the University o f Wales. In 1900 Birmingham
secured its charter—the first o f the great industrial cities to do so
—and Lodge was invited to become the first Principal o f the new
University o f Birmingham. He remained at Birmingham for
nearly twenty years and then retired to Norm anton House, Lake, .
near Salisbury, with the intention o f devoting the remainder o f
his life to the study o f the ether o f space in both its physical and
psychical aspects.
M r Joseph Chamberlain was mainly responsible for the
OLIVER JOSEPH LODGE
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OBITUARY NOTICES
foundation o f the University; and it was through him that
Lodge became the first Principal. Lodge was a great leader, and
he had his ow n notions o f the duties o f the head o f a modern
university. He had little taste for the routine w ork o f committees,
no liking at all for the details o f finance. Indeed, he confessed
that his knowledge o f the principles governing the drawing-up
o f a balance sheet was confined to an appreciation o f the fact
that the totals on the two sides o f the account must be the same.
These matters were delegated to others, and Lodge confined him
self, w ith signal success, to shaping and guiding the policy o f the
new University. At the time o f its foundation many o f the
citizens o f Birmingham regarded such an institution as un
necessary and entirely useless, but when Lodge retired the
University had become an integral part o f the sociological life o f
the city. This change o f attitude was due in very large measure
to the personality and activity o f Lodge. He not only convinced
the public o f the material advantages to be derived by the city
from having in its midst a centre o f scientific teaching and research,
but also increasingly insisted on the value o f the humane studies
to the life o f the community. The high position which the
University now occupies is a tribute to the strength and extent
o f the foundations laid by Lodge and his early colleagues.
W hile at University College, London, Lodge read before the
Physical Society, in 1875, in conjunction w ith Carey Foster, a
paper on the shape o f the lines o f flow and the equipotential lines
between two electrodes applied to a conducting surface. This
was his first im portant paper, and he followed it up with others
on electrical conduction. To this period, also, belongs a series o f
papers on thermal conductivity, his well-known modification
o f Mance’s method for the measurement o f battery resistance,
and a proposal for a compact and stable form o f Daniell cell to be
used as a standard o f electromotive force. During a summer at
Heidelberg he read Maxwell’s two volumes on Electricity
Magnetism, and when he returned to London he produced a
paper describing a model illustrating mechanically the passage o f
electricity through metals, electrolytes and dielectrics, according
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