Lodge was born in Liverpool and received his bachelor's degree in Mathematics (1945) and DPhil in Theoretical Nuclear Physics (1948) from Oxford University.
In 1961, Lodge joined the faculty of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST).
[1] In 1964, Lodge authored the text Elastic Liquids (Academic Press), and spent the academic year 1965–1966 in Madison, Wisconsin, USA as a visiting professor; in 1968 the Lodge family moved to Madison permanently.
The Lodge rubberlike liquid managed to explain most of what could be reliably measured at the time (other than non-constant shear viscosity) and also anticipated nonlinear behavior not reliably measured until years later, such as the Lodge-Meissner relation.
In 1974, Lodge followed up Elastic Liquids with his second text, Body Tensor Fields in Continuum Mechanics (Academic Press, 1974).