OBITUARY NOTICES
pondering over, and w ith an eloquence which needed no
rhetorical aids to make it impressive.
The British Association became an integral part o f Lodge’s
life after his first attendance at the annual meeting held at Bradford
in 1873. He was then a young man o f tw enty-tw o who happened
to be at Leeds on his father’s business when he heard about the
forthcoming meeting and obtained permission to attend it. He
had already a fair knowledge o f physics and he gladly welcomed
the opportunity o f coming into contact w ith some o f the leaders
in this field and in that o f mathematics. The president o f
Section A was H. J. S. Smith, and among other distinguished
mathematicians who had assembled in his honour were Cayley,
Sylvester, W . K. Clifford, Clerk Maxwell and Felix Klein.
Physics was represented by Lord Rayleigh, Schuster, Spottis-
woode, Osborne Reynolds, N orm an Lockyer, Huggins, Balfour
Stewart, and the meteorologists, G. J. Symons and James
Glaisher, whose mathematical son, J. W . L. Glaisher, was secretary
o f the Section.
It is not surprising that such an assembly o f scientific men o f
the first rank should have impressed a young student and that the
whole meeting was an experience which Lodge always cherished
w ith gratitude. It was at Bradford that he first saw Maxwell,
who gave a notable evening address on molecules, and learned
o f Maxwell’s treatise on Electricity
Magnetism which had
appeared earlier in the same year. He hastened to buy the two
volumes, and they were the chief sources o f inspiration o f much
o f his life’s work.
After Bradford, Lodge attended almost every annual meeting
o f the Association up to that at Blackpool in 1936. Few members
o f the Association have served it so long and so well as Lodge;
few members could recount so many notable happenings at the
Association’s meetings. He was probably the last survivor o f that
audience which assembled to hear Tyndall’s Belfast address in
1874, and he had a vivid memory o f the ‘sulphurous atmosphere’
in which that famous defence o f a rather simple-minded
materialism was expounded. He became secretary o f Section A
560
OLIVER JOSEPH LODGE
$6l
at the Dublin meeting in 1878, when he first met his great friend
G. F. FitzGerald, and began a long period o f tenure o f that
office. He was president o f the Section at the Cardiff meeting in
1891 and in his address to the Section he strongly advocated the
establishment o f a National Physical Laboratory. He was pre
sident o f the Association in 1913 at a very large meeting held at
Birmingham, where he was then the Principal o f the University.
His address was chiefly concerned w ith the philosophic
significance o f relationships and laws derived from observation
and experiments on matter in various forms—a subject to which
most o f his scientific w ork and thought was devoted throughout
his life. It represented a reaction against the tendency to concen
trate attention upon atomism and the limitation o f investigation
to what appealed to human sensory organs. Matter is essentially
discontinuous, but Lodge held that a continuous medium was
essential to explain the action o f one piece o f matter on another.
‘The ether’, he said, ‘is the universal connecting medium which
binds the universe together, and makes it a coherent whole
instead o f a chaotic collection o f independent isolated fragments.’
Just as continuity is postulated for space and time, so it was
assumed for the ether; and he urged that, in spite o f the failure
o f laboratory experiment to prove a mechanical connexion
between matter and the ether, or Einstein’s principle o f
relativity which was then beginning to receive attention, belief
in the ultimate continuity o f the ether would be established by
realistic evidence and philosophic understanding o f it.
Lodge’s first communication to the British Association was
made at the Glasgow meeting in 1876, when he described the
model already mentioned to illustrate mechanically the passage
o f electricity through metals, electrolytes and dielectrics. He
afterwards became the secretary o f a research committee
which reported at the York meeting in 1881 on an improved
form o f high insulation key for electrometer work; and the
report was written by him. At the Montreal meeting in 1884,
he gave one o f the evening lectures and illustrated it by a number
o f experiments on dusty and dust-free air. Tyndall and Lord
OBITUARY NOTICES
Rayleigh had investigated the dark spaces due to dust-free
planes produced by various conditions, and Lodge and his assistant,
J. W . Clark, had been engaged for a year in experimental
researches on the subject. One o f the results was the discovery
that a brush discharge cleared a confined space o f smoke or dust
completely, and he illustrated this and other striking effects in his
lecture. The smoke experiment attracted much attention and led
eventually to the application o f fume-deposition in industrial
works. It was also at the Montreal meeting that Lodge took up
the subject o f the seat o f the electromotive force in the voltaic
cell, then and later a subject o f much controversy.
Though at an early age Lodge felt that his place was in the
field o f physics, he m ight have achieved more in the domains o f
chemistry or mathematics if he had followed his natural bent.
He had to be mainly an experimentalist, but his chief interests
were in hidden causes rather than in observed effects. ‘My
instinct’, he confessed towards the end o f his life, ‘seemed to be
more abstract, rejoicing in hidden forces, atomic occurrences, and
other things which can never be seen—ultimately becoming
more absorbed in the ether as a non-sensuous reality—than in the
material objects around us.’
Another characteristic to which he confessed was that o f putting
off the satisfaction which the completion o f a particular line o f
w ork m ight bring. W hen he had discovered the means o f detect
ing electric waves by means o f the coherer, the late Lord Rayleigh
said to him, ‘W ell, now you can go ahead; there is your life
w ork’. But, as Lodge himself has said, ‘I didn’t . . . though I
went on w ith it more or less at intervals; but I attended to many
other things as well, and the result was that Maxwell’s ether
waves . . . were mainly worked out and developed practically
by others’. True; but the remark is a characteristic understatement
o f the importance and amount o f Lodge’s contributions to the
advancement o f radio-telegraphy.
Though Lodge showed in 1884 how dust or smoke could be
dispersed from an enclosed space by electrostatic discharges,
he did not carry this experiment beyond the stage o f a laboratory
562
Dostları ilə paylaş: |