Oliver Lodge's ether and the birth of British broadcasting

Abstract

This book chapter argues that the philosophical idea of the 'ether' advanced by the physicist Oliver Lodge in the late 19th century acted as a kind of 'public sphere', and hence influenced concepts of broadcasting in the early 20th century, especially in the case of the BBC in Britain. The influence of Lodge's ether was not just to popularise the notion of the airwaves as an intrinsically public space; it was also to suggest a notion of knowledge as something that could be synthesised across several intellectual domains. In setting out this argument, the chapter traces the passage of Lodge's thinking through popular magazines in the Edwardian era, and into concepts of broadcasting articulated by Reith and other founders of the BBC in the post-war era. It concludes that the BBC might be considered to be the real world embodiment of Lodge's etheric thinking.