Modern Views of Matter 1899-1900

Lodge had begun to recover from his illness by the time that the British Association met at Dover in September. Poynting, in his Presidential Address to Section A, expressed the gratification of all present that the scheme “first proposed from this chair by Dr. Lodge” for the establishment of a National Physical Laboratory had finally come to fruition, while Marconi, who had just scored a major success by transmitting messages between ships of the British fleet 20 miles apart, set up apparatus in the Town Hall to establish a radio link with members of the corresponding French Association, meeting in Boulogne. But the meeting was mainly notable for J. J. Thomson's successful promotion of the corpuscular electron on the basis of his recent measurement of e/m for the particles emitted in the photoelectric effect, combined with his earlier direct measurement of the fundamental electric charges collected on water droplets acting as condensation nuclei.

This was, according to Lodge, the “first international publication” of Thomson's researches, a contingent of the French Association members crossing over specially from Boulogne to be present. The audience was apparently “deeply interested but not altogether convinced”. However, Lodge, who was supposed to speak on “The Seat of the E.M.F. in a Voltaic Pile”, “was so enamoured of … Thomson's brilliant discovery that for the first quarter of an hour” he could speak of nothing else.