bring the filings more closely together, that is, to cohere, and thus their electrical resistance decreases, from which cause this piece of apparatus was termed by Sir Oliver Lodge a coherer. Hence the receiving instrument, which may be a telegraph relay, that normally would not indicate any sign of current from the small battery, can be operated when electric oscillations are set up. Branly further found that when the filings had once cohered they retained their low resistance until shaken apart, for instance, by tapping on the tube. The coherer, however, was not sensitive enough to be used reliably as radio developed. Lodge's demonstrations British physicist and writer Sir Oliver Lodge came close to being the first to prove the existence of Maxwell's electromagnetic waves. In a series of spring 1888 experiments conducted with a Leyden jar connected to a length of wire with spaced spark gaps he noticed he was getting different size sparks and a glow pattern along the wire that seemed to be a function of wavelength. Before he could present his own findings he learned of Hertz' series of proofs on the same subject. On 1 June 1894, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford University, Lodge gave a memorial lecture on the work of Hertz (recently deceased) and the German physicist's proof of the existence of electromagnetic waves 6 years earlier. Lodge set up a demonstration on the quasi-optical nature of "Hertzian waves" (radio waves) and demonstrated their similarity to light and vision including reflection and transmission. Later in June and on 14 August 1894 he did similar experiments, increasing the distance of transmission up to 55 meters. In these lectures Lodge demonstrated a detector that would become standard in radio work, an improved version of Branly's detector which Lodge dubbed the coherer. It consisted of a glass tube containing metal filings between two electrodes. When the small electrical charge from waves from an antenna were applied to the electrodes, the metal particles would cling together or "cohere" causing the device to become conductive allowing the current from a battery to pass through it. In Lodge's setup the slight impulses from the coherer were picked up by a mirror galvanometer which would deflect a beam of light being projected on it, giving a visual signal that the impulse was received. After receiving a signal the metal filings in