Oliver Lodge John Henry Poynting
In the autumn of 1879 good Sir Josiah Mason viewed the progress of what was to be the last benefaction to his adopted town of Birmingham, the college of science where the young people of the Midlands were to be able to learn the 'pure' sciences after their schooldays and he found it was good. The building over whose construction he had presided with such concentrated energy was now all but ready for habitation, the Articles of Association for the college whose composition he had watched with such direct interest had been completed for five years, and the governing body over whose composition he had taken such care was in being. Nothing was wanting except to appoint staff, to begin work in the autumn of 1880, so that the first students could be admitted at the same time.
It was characteristic of this bounteous knight that though he did not cut corners in the endowment or expenditure of his new college, he was very much in charge of all aspects of it's making, and so, even though he had knowledgeable advisers on the appointments committee (two of whom were the excellent physicians Dr. J Gibbs Blake and Dr. T P Heslop) Sir Josiah's was the decisive voice when it came to the choice of the four successful candidates who emerged from the competition. It is also a characteristic of him that his shrewdness far outmatched his modest formal education, and he showed in these first four appointments an extraordinary acumen in picking young men who were to have truly distinguished careers in their subjects. All four of the first Professors were to end up in the Fellowship of the Royal Society, all were before their day ended to contribute remarkably to the sum of scientific achievement. Micaiah Hill, Professor of Mathematics, did not stay long in Birmingham, but he was to add lustre to the mathematics teaching and research at University College, London, and crown his career as Vice Chancellor of the great if heterogeneous University of London. William Tilden, Professor of Chemistry did remarkable work in Birmingham before he was tempted away by the Royal College of Science (now Imperial College) in London, where he added a knighthood to his FRS before his day ended, and he is now remembered as one of the splendid band of chemists who found ways to make what had previously been organic products from artificial ingredients, in his case as the man who discovered how to make artificial rubber.
Of the two who were to come and stay, Thomas William Bridge was to acquire renown for his investigations into the animal life of the deepest rifts of the sea (notably of the Challenger Rift) from which he had built up a remarkable collection of samples which were the pride of Birmingham's Zoology museum until the vandalising Lancelot Hogben threw as many of them as he could - and any other departmental possessions not gleaming with novelty - away into a series of dustbins.
The fourth of this remarkable quartet is one of our subjects today. When Sir Josiah and his advisers came to read through the letters of commendation which were given to the finalists in the competition for the chair of physics, which according to the custom of 1860 - 1914 had been printed and distributed to the electors for ease of perusal (there being neither photocopies nor emails in those happy days!) there was one letter which must have outweighed all others - that given to Mr J H Poynting by his chief at Cambridge, Professor James Clerk Maxwell
Clerk Maxwell had not only written this powerful testimonial for his protégé, he had also died shortly before Sir Josiah and his helpers sat down and reviewed the field of applicants for the Chair of Physics and a flood of long and eulogistic obituaries in virtually every national paper (see DNB passim) must have added weight to the support he gave to Poynting. That it was Sir Josiah who chose Poynting I have not the slightest doubt , and in that choice he completed the display of his remarkable acumen in the choice of men from fields about which he can have known as little as I do!
Mr Poynting took up his appointment at the same time as his three colleagues, and they were all at that historic ceremony on 20th October 1880. Sir Josiah completed his life's work of benevolence to Birmingham by handing over the keys of the college as a symbol of its beginning of life, with its staff of seven and its 35 students. The latter were chosen by the teachers, and it says a lot for Poynting and his colleagues in 1880 that out of these 35 science students eleven were young women!
Having been appointed, at the early age of 28, John Henry Poynting sought a partner for his life. On 9th June 1880 he married Maria Adney, who was to survive him and by whom he was to have a son and two daughters. He was contented with the chair to which he had been appointed, for he showed no signs of hunting for promotion or celebrity, but the excellence of the work he was to produce in Birmingham was to bring its tangible rewards, a Cambridge Sc.D. in 1887, the coveted FRS in 1888 (of which he was to be Vice-President in 1910-11), and the post of Dean of the Faculty of Science of the new University in 1900, which he held until failing health forced him to resign it in 1913.
While Poynting was thus quietly settling in in his new home city, the northern port of Liverpool was getting itself ready to be academically upgraded. Unlike Birmingham, where one determined man had done everything to set the ball rolling, Liverpool set to with a mass of committees out of whose endless deliberations there emerged a college, the third member of the Victorian University which was to lumber on until the component colleges fell apart after the death of the old Queen. In due course, about a year later than Sir Josiah, a college committee sat down to select a Professor of Physics and found itself with fifteen finalists, but, when it came to the point, only one truly outstanding man, whom they duly appointed to start when the college began work in the autumn of 1881.
This was Dr. Oliver Joseph Lodge, then in his 30th year, in a career parallel with, but otherwise wildly different to John Henry Poynting's. Lodge, the son of a well-to-do farmer from Penkhull in Staffordshire, who had gone via nondescript schooling to University College London, where he became attracted to his life's work by a remarkable scientist, Robert Carey Foster, Professor of Physics in the College, who was to raise the subject there from an 18th century gentleman's hobby to a field of European importance. Lodge quickly became a prize pupil and collaborator of the Professors, obtaining his B.Sc. in 1875 after a year's study, and (there not being PhD's to be had until many years later) his D.Sc. in 1877. The eldest of nine children (eight sons and one daughter) of his parents, he married (on 22nd August 1877, just after obtaining his doctorate) young Fanny Alexander by whom he was to have six sons and six daughters (some of whom lived into the time when I came to Birmingham), and not surprisingly he needed to look for a position with good pay. This he found at Liverpool, where he flourished for 19 years, producing there all the research by which he became known, being elected FRS in 1887.
Electricity had fascinated Lodge as much as Poynting from the time when he heard Clerk Maxwell speak about it at a BA meeting in 1873 and what he heard was to set the pattern of much Liverpool research. It was however not merely his distinction as a scientist which led Joseph Chamberlain, a man as fond of getting his own way as Sir Josiah Mason, to select him as Birmingham's first Principal, an act which brought our two men together from a comfortable distance at which they could admire one another to a close proximity in which their very different characters needed to co-exist.
In this short sketch I can only draw your attention to some basic traits of these two great men which are noteworthy in any assessment of their common factors and their differences. Firstly, we can glance at their physical differences:
Poynting's icon (to use the new Dictionary of National Biography's jargon) hangs in this very building as the visible sign of its dedication to his memory.
It demonstrates the man very competently, but there is an even better one, a photograph even though this was essentially taken to the greater glory of Joseph Chamberlain! It shows the entire academic staff and lay governing body of the brand new University in the summer of 1901 (it appears to have been taken in the Mason College laundry yard, but more knowledgeable old Masonians assured me that there was a reputable space at the back of the College buildings which could be used without loss of dignity for group photos of this kind. Assembled in all the robes of academic splendour which they could muster, there they sit or stand, the lay members differentiated by their morning coats and top hats. In the front row sits (naturally) Joe, on either side of him Samuel Edwards (Lord Mayor) and C G Beale (Vice-Chancellor). Lodge as Principal is on the far left and Poynting, as the senior of the Deans of the four Faculties of the University, sits on the far right of the picture.
Photographs on this page reproduced by kind permission of University of Birmingham, Information Services, Special Collections.
Even all the glory of the full dress robes of a Cambridge Doctor of Science cannot hide the fact that John Henry Poynting was a short, tubby, homely man who shrank into himself on an occasion of formal splendour such as this. And even more so Oliver Lodge, resplendent in the made-to-measure new Vice-Cancellarial robes (as worn today by his successors) does not hide the fact that he is glorying in his new status. Six foot four, his massive domed head a splendid surmount on his mighty body he is not shrinking here!
And this is a very revealing surface differentiation, for I noted at the time of gathering material for my previous attempt at a description of these two great men, that it covers a basic difference. Poynting was totally immersed in his work, whether as a constantly improving teacher or as the inquisitorial spirit, hunting with unwearying curiosity for answers to some of the great questions of the sphere of physics in which he had immersed himself. By contrast Poynting made not the slightest ripple on the Politics or Social Life of Birmingham and the West Midlands - only in the field of biology did he take an active part, being elected after long service President of the Horticultural Society of Birmingham and, in a practical way Professor and Mrs Poynting ran a farm near Alvechurch until his health failed him and he was obliged to give up agriculture and remove to a house in Ampton Rd, Edgbaston, where he lived for the rest of his life.
Poynting's health was precarious from his thirties, when he was found to be diabetic, and in the days before Banting's discovery of insulin this can have been a most inhibiting trouble as far as daily life went, necessitating a strict and austere regime, (in many ways the miracle is what he succeeded in achieving before his body collapsed). You will hear of these academic achievements, but I cannot pass the years on the farm at Alvechurch without a thought concerning how much it must have taken out of him, even allowing for the devoted help of his wife and family. The pictures do not hide the fact that at fifty plus he was already fading physically, though memorial comments by those who knew him invariably speak of his warmth of spirit, kindness and helpfulness - perhaps the best evidence is that of his former colleague Edmund Fournier d'Albe, who was in some ways influenced by both our great men, but who was very appreciative of Poynting's helpfulness in furthering his work and career, as his generous contribution to Poynting's memorial shows.
Lodge, by contrast, was a large man, robust in body and activity, outgoing in character (as befitted a father of twelve children) and an imposing figure wherever he went, and his robust health enabled him to take a far more active part in the greater activity which is the lot of the Chief officer of an institution such as a University. From the local papers and the Mason College Magazine which changed to the Birmingham University Gazette when the charter of Queen Victoria came into force, we can see how Dr. (all too soon Sir) Oliver was not only an active worker but a deliberately visible one. Where Poynting kept hidden in his office or laboratory unless he was wanted, Lodge strode around Central Birmingham as one who owned the place, and for the first fourteen years of the century, so it was.
The year of the Great War made changes not only in Europe but all over the world, east, west, north and south alike. One of them, unoticed in the outer world, was the death of John Henry Poynting, as quietly as he had lived, a victim at the last of the diabetes which had haunted him and weakened him from giving all his powers to his academic problems. Felix opportunitate mortis, he died on 30th March; the Archduke Franz Ferdinand still alive and a continuing peace an apparent certainty.
Lodge, at 63, had to bear the strain of heading an institution which had not been prepared for what followed over the next four years. There is no doubt in my mind that he was neither physically or psychologically prepared for it - nor could he have foreseen the effect which his fiddling with psychic phenomena over the previous 30 plus years was to have on him when a real disaster came close to him. As I suspect all of you present know his young son Raymond went to war and was killed in 1916; his body was never discovered. Though Oliver Lodge was to live another 24 years, he lost touch with the real world and became absorbed in 'etheric' experimentation; there is something infinitely pathetic in this man of great intellect haunting the studios of fake experiments with their fraudulent 'ectoplasmic' phenomena in the vain hope of recovering contact with this lost child - all the more so in that Lodge knew every trick in the fraud's books and constantly saw through them. How far he had got out of touch in his retirement at Normanton in Wiltshire may be seen from the fate of his attempt to reassert himself as a serious physicist with an encyclopaedia of the subject, the text of which lies among his papers in the Heslop room, together with the mass of correspondence from publisher and referees. Unlike Poynting, whose frail physical health had not cracked his intellectual spiritual ability when death claimed him, Lodge's splendid bodily health failed to support his mind when the time of strain came upon him.
Here in Birmingham we had two practitioners of the science of physics over fourteen exciting years. You may therefore be surprised to hear that in the last respect I view them as in some way mirror images of the great men who chose them for their tasks. Poynting's great qualities of carefulness, accuracy and infinite capacity for patient and unrelenting search for his goal, together with his lack of personal flamboyance were the things which found an echo in Sir Josiah Mason's own qualities; Clerk Maxwell's testimonial would have had a powerful impact, but when united with the characteristics visible in the young interviewee (remember, Poynting was only 27 when the Mason College post came his way!) it would have merely swept any doubts from the old knight's mind.
And in the same way, when the flamboyant but superbly able Joseph Chamberlain went a-hunting for the Principal of his new University, whose charter was all but complete except for the name, it is clear that he was not looking for a most careful pedantic master of detail like RS Heath , the sitting tenant Principal at Mason College. Joe was looking for a man who stood out, whose abilities were not merely noted by the small group of workers in his narrow academic field, but who would give Birmingham the initiatives to make real the vision of a Midlands university centred in Birmingham, which Joe himself had. In Lodge he found a responsive figure, not merely distinguished in electrical and etheric science, but able and willing to give life to a paper idea - and a very visible physical presence.
Such in brief is my vision of these two remarkable men. They had plenty of individual characteristics and many intellectual and other interests which would have marked them out as very special beings, and Birmingham University (and Mason College before it was chartered) was exceedingly fortunate in having their services in the crucial formative years up to 1914. However, as I look further and further into their careers I have gradually become convinced that in the last resort they owed their final career steps to personal traits; (over and above their academic and administrative abilities, formidable as these were) that in each case some part of their personalities echoed those of the great Birmingham fathers to whom it fell to appoint them, Sir Josiah Mason and Joseph Chamberlain.
* I should point out in parenthesis, that the reasons for Joseph Chamberlain's absence from the great days of Mason's last years were highly legitimate. He was Mayor of Birmingham when the foundation stone was laid, but he had just suffered the great loss of his life, the death of his much loved second wife, Florence, in a still-birth and those who knew anything of JC will know that the blow had paralysed him. He did not get on with Mason, as all who know of the commercial history of Birmingham are aware, but he was in no fit state to attend the laying, and decency was surely preserved by the presence of the Deputy Mayor, Joe's brother, Richard. As for 1880, Joe had by then entered Parliament and had just entered upon his all-absorbing new post of President of the Board of Trade.