A Pioneer of Connection: Recovering the Life and Work of Oliver Lodge—James Mussell and Graeme Gooday (Pittsburgh, PA, USA: Univ. Pittsburgh Press, 2020, 304 pp.)

There has not been a biography of Oliver Lodge published for decades—and with good reason. No one cares! That is the basic thesis of this biography. The editors observe that while Oliver Lodge was a physicist, engineer, spiritualist, science popularizer, university manager, and a key figure in late 19th- and early 20th-century culture, today he remains relatively neglected, largely because of the apparent contradictions between different aspects of his career. For example, Lodge was a physicist, but at the same time, he was also a spiritualist and psychic. Also, Lodge embraced new physics, including Einstein’s theory of relativity, which did not require the existence of the ether to explain wave motion through space, but at the same time, Lodge continued to embrace the presence and importance of the ether, even after experiments were unable to detect or measure it, and after the concept had fallen out of favor among mainstream scientists. The editors claim that Lodge often used the concept of the ether to “provide a ready explanation for what would otherwise be occult phenomena.”