Sir Oliver Lodge

Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge was born on 12 June 1851 in Penkhull, Staffordshire, and became a distinguished physicist known for work on electricity, thermal conductivity, and early radio (he demonstrated wireless signaling and patented the “Lodge plug” spark plug).

A figure of real scientific standing, he brought the habits of a working physicist to the study of psychic phenomena, beginning systematic investigation of telepathy and mediumship in the late 1880s. He was a member of the Ghost Club and served as President of the Society for Psychical Research from 1901 to 1903.

Lodge’s psychical research became deeply personal after his son Raymond was killed in 1915 during the First World War. Sittings with the trance medium Gladys Osborne Leonard produced communications that the family believed came from Raymond, and Lodge described them in his bestselling 1916 book Raymond, or Life and Death.

Written into a landscape of mass wartime bereavement, the book spoke to countless grieving readers, though its concrete descriptions of the afterlife drew controversy. Lodge continued to argue, as a scientist, for the survival of personality after death until his own death in 1940.

A note on the evidence. Lodge’s scientific eminence did not settle the survival question: critics noted the mediumistic material’s vulnerability to suggestion, cold-reading, and a grieving father’s hope. The Atlas presents his careful, sincere conviction while keeping the survival hypothesis open and unproven.