Continuity 1908-1915

Lodge remained a Life Member and Honorary Vice-President of the Liverpool University Physical Society all the time he was Principal of the University of Birmingham and during the years of his retirement until his death at the age of 89 in 1940, and it was, at first, mainly through this Society that he maintained at least a nominal contact with the city where he had done his most productive work.

However, in March 1912, he was named an Honorary Member of the Literary and Philosophical Society, at the time when Wilberforce became President, and it seems to have been there, rather than at the Physical Society, that he lectured on his relatively infrequent later visits to Liverpool. On two occasions in 1914 he was proposed as a possible guest speaker at the Physical Society but the British Association meeting in Australia, and then the War, intervened. Though much of his later work has no connection with Liverpool – and certainly not with the Liverpool Physical Society – it was still dominated by die interests he had developed in the period immediately before 1900, and cannot be left out of an account of his work at Liverpool.

Lodge was certainly remembered at the Physical Society for many years after he had ceased to be an active participant. On 31 January 1908 E. J. Whelan lectured on wireless telegraphy, mentioning Lodge's work among that of many others, while on 27 November of the same year H. R. Hassie outlined the “Problems of Ether Drift” with detailed explanations of Lodge's contributions in this field.