Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge lived from 1851 to 1940. He was a physicist, educator and psychical researcher, and a prominent member of the Society for Physical Research.
Although he made important contributions to both physics and psychical research, Lodge is perhaps best known today for his book Raymond A Life, which was published in 1916 and dealt with the mediumistic communications received from his son, who was killed during World War I.
Oliver Lodge was born on June 12th, 1851 in Penk Hall, Staffordshire, England. His father was the 23rd of 25 children, and Oliver was the eldest of seven sons and a daughter. His father was a successful businessman, who supplied clay to the local potteries. Oliver was sent away to boarding school when he was eight, but he was unhappy there and his father brought him home at the age of 14. He began helping in his family business. For the next seven years, Oliver traveled as an agent for his father. When he was sixteen he was sent to stay with his maiden aunt Annie in London. While he was there, he antended university classes in physics and these stimulated his interest in the subject. He ended up receiving his Bachelor of Science from University College London and eventually his doctorate. He then married Mary Marshall, by whom he was to have his own large family of six sons and six daughters.
In 1881, Lodge was appointed as the first professor of physics at University College in Liverpool. There he met many prominent people involved in the spiritualist community. Spiritualism was at its height between 1840 and 1920, so.
This was the heyday of spiritualism, of which Lodge became very much a supporter, believer and researcher.
In 1900, he eventually became the principal of another university in Birmingham. He took the position under the one condition that he would continue to work on hispsychic al research. Around that time, he was elected president of the Society for Psychical Research.
It was a major development in psychical research when several different mediums on different continents began to making statements attributed to the same communicators, that made sense only when brought together. These communications became known as cross correspondence, and could be understood as the products of a single guiding intelligence. This convinced Lodge of the survival after death, but it was only after an extraordinary series of events that his belief turned to faith and he became a dedicated follower of spiritualism yet again. In August 1915, a message to this son Raymond had been killed in the battle in a battle in France.
After this, Oliver and his wife began to attend seances with other mediums in England.
At one of these, his wife was told that Raymond appeared in a group photograph with a walking stick. Another medium repeated the same thing with a more detailed description of the photograph. Including the fact that someone was leaning on Raymond’s shoulder. Oliver and his wife had no such photograph at that time. And marked these messages as meaningless. Suddenly a friend who had no idea that they were going to these seances. Offered to send them a picture that he had with their son in it. When the photograph arrived, it proved to match Raymond’s communications. Through the mediums exactly when describing his position in the picture.
That communication and the ones that followed were the basis of the book he wrote the most famous of his books, Raymond: A Life. The book. Uses advanced ideas about at the afterlife. It created a sensation and brought lodge both ridicule from the scientific establishment and praise from the spiritualist community.
Lodge died on August 22nd, 1940 at his home in Normanton House in Wilt Shire, England.
He left a sealed envelope, of the contents of which he was to try to communicate after death, with the SPR Society. No satisfactory messages seem to have been received from him. However, there is supposed to have been a communication of another sort. The journalist Paul Tabori, in a short biography, reports that in September of nineteen forty hundreds besieged a big spiritualist church in New York City. Where Lodges wispy form was alleged to have floated over the altar, announcing itself as Sir Oliver.
