Radio Liverpool

Posted on: 13 February 2025 by Kim Fisher, VG&M Visitor Services in 2025

Did you know that the world’s first wireless Morse code radio message was sent from the Victoria Building’s Jubilee Clock Tower in Liverpool? Professor Oliver Lodge was one of the early pioneers of radio and this blog charts his time at Liverpool and his revolutionary research on #WorldRadioDay.

Photograph of Oliver Lodge from University of Liverpool Special Collections & Archives

Did you know that the world’s first wireless Morse code radio message was sent from the Victoria Building’s Jubilee Clock Tower in Liverpool? Professor Oliver Lodge was one of the early pioneers of radio and this blog charts his time at Liverpool and his revolutionary research.

Lodge in Liverpool

Sir Oliver Lodge was the first professor of Physics and Mathematics at University College Liverpool serving from 1881-1900.  

The college had acquired a site in an old asylum building that architect Alfred Waterhouse had been tasked to convert. On 14 January 1882, the college opened to 45 students and Lodge was one of the first professors to move into the renovated building.

 
Plan of the converted asylum building with the physics laboratories on the right of the ground floor. 

Ten years later the Victoria Building was built to accommodate the arts students and growing student population. Lodge expanded his area into the northern section of the old building, set up new courses and a laboratory for electrotechnics which was closely linked to his own research on electric storage batteries and wireless.

In 1888, Heinrich Hertz had produced and discovered electromagnetic waves. Lodge began working on these waves in March 1899 and demonstrated the use of a Leyden Jar in the physics lecture theatre at University College Liverpool:

“The walls of the lecture theatre that were metallically coated flashed and sparkled in sympathy with the waves which were being omitted by the oscillation on the lecture table…the sparkling clearly showed the propagation of waves freely in all directions through space.” – Oliver Lodge’s recollection from his autobiography ‘Past Years.’

Although lecturing took up a lot of his time during both the daytime and evening, he was also able to conduct his own research and give public lectures and demonstrations.

At an Oxford lecture in 1894, he demonstrated a piece of electrical equipment called a coherer which detected electromagnetic waves in the air. Lodge had improved Edouard Branly's coherer radio wave detector by adding a trembler which dislodged clumped metal filings and restored the device's sensitivity.

How the Coherer worked

A coherer designed or used by Sir Oliver Lodge. Paper label marked in handwriting ‘June 23, 1894’. Image used courtesy of the Science Museum Group

The coherer consisted of a glass tube with two iron filings positioned between two electrodes which would clump together when triggered by radio waves. The trembler that Lodge added was used as an on-and-off controller of the spark gap which would then dislodge the clumped filings and reset the device.

Lodge-type coherer receiver created in Russia in 1895. Image used courtesy of the Science Museum Group

Some of his public demonstrations in 1894 connected a sensitive mirror galvanometer to the coherer so that the detection of the electromagnetic waves was visible to the audience in the form of a moving beam of light. At a later lecture he connected the coherer to a receiving circuit which demonstrated Morse code signals that were transmitted by radio waves and enabled them to be transcribed on paper by Lodge’s assistant. 

The messages that were sent and received went 60 yards, through two internal and one external stone wall. Lodge had therefore transmitted a radio signal one year before Marconi, but one year after Tesla.

The First Long Distance Radio Message

The Victoria Building and Jubilee Clock Tower circa 1895.

Early signalling in 1897 started off small with Lodge sending signals from the Victoria Building Jubilee Clock Tower to one of the college buildings in the university quadrangle, around 100 metres away.

“Signals were obtained across the full width of the quadrangle, and later, with larger apparatus, between the college tower and another high building half a mile away.”  - from ‘Signalling across Space without Wires’, by Oliver Lodge, 1900.

Plan of the university quadrangle from around 1907 showing the Victoria Building (bottom right), asylum (middle) and surrounding quadrangle buildings.

During Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in July 1897, the clock tower was again used by Lodge, but this time it was to send the world’s first long distance radio message in Morse code to his assistant on the roof of Lewis’s store which was half a mile away in the city centre.

The view from the Victoria Building’s Jubilee Clock Tower looking towards the old Lewis’ building.  

Lodge was often a guest speaker at University College Liverpool’s Physical Society meetings and in 1898, he spoke at the ‘Wireless Telegraphy’ lecture at University College Liverpool. Lodge discussed that with more powerful apparatus than those previously used from the Victoria Building’s tower, signals could also be received from further than half a mile away.

Lodge often sent radio signals to his home near Sefton Park from the college so that his wife would know he was on his way home. This was achieved by causing the radio transmitter and receiver to speak to one another on the same circuit and if passed round a cable, a high-pitched noise could be heard by every telephone in the area. He demonstrated this high-pitched noise to the students in the lecture theatre but what he failed to tell them was that he’d had to stop these transmissions as the sound annoyed his neighbours and people in the local area.

Extract from the 1898 Physical Society lecture, Sphinx Student Magazine, page 190, PUB/3/2/3 Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool.

"I can hear all that goes on in the neighbouring telephone wires and can even answer back with a suitable microphonic transmitter". The Sphinx Student Magazine, 5, 1887-1889.

Recognition for Radio

Lodge had been working on radio wave transmissions since 1880 and was frustrated that Marconi was sensationalised in the press, but his own work had not received as much recognition.  He admitted that he hadn’t seen the immense potential of wireless compared to wired communication at the time, however his research and the 1898 patent for space-transmitted signals encouraged others to innovate the wireless telecommunications that we know today.

Lodge patented a moving coil loudspeaker in 1898 and it became the basis for communications systems incorporated into telephones, radio, and television – in fact the modern devices that we use today that generate sound from electronic systems are Lodge’s moving coil loudspeakers!

In the same year, Lodge’s achievements were recognised by a civic banquet held in his honour in Liverpool Town Hall and he was Knighted in 1902.

The December 1929 issue of Radio-Craft Magazine featured Lodge on its front cover. It included a tribute to his work under the byline "Men who have made radio" and called him "The Grand Old Man of Radio" who had ultimately made it possible for Marconi to exploit radio's commercial possibilities. Some academics have argued that Lodge should be recognised as the inventor of radio telegraphy rather than Marconi.

A copy of the Radio Craft magazine is available at the University of Liverpool’s Special Collections and Archives (SPEC S/TK6540.R12).

Lodge died in 1940, but his work continued to be recognised posthumously.

In 1995, the Royal Society recognized his scientific achievement at a special ceremony at Oxford University which was attended by his grandsons and great grandsons.

Lodge’s Liverpool Legacy

Bust of Oliver Lodge by C.J Allen, University of Liverpool Art & Heritage collections.

Oliver Lodge’s legacy lives on at the University of Liverpool’s Special Collections and Archives which holds 30 of his research notebooks and letters from correspondence during his time at university College Liverpool. To find out more please visit their website Oliver Lodge Collection - Special Collections & Archives - Library at University of Liverpool

The Oliver Lodge Laboratory was officially opened on 15^th May 1969 for the University of Liverpool’s physics department, in honour of the first professor of physics and the bust of Oliver Lodge created by C.J Allen is on display in the department.

The Oliver Lodge Laboratory, University of Liverpool Campus