"No you’re not mistaken – the title really is “A MACHINE for a Perpetual Electrified GARDEN”

So now take a close look at the rest of the print  and see if you can work out what’s going on before reading any further!

I thought at first it must be a satirical comment on some long forgotten event, rather like some  Rowlandson or Cruikshank cartoons but I eventually discovered it isn’t that at all but a serious scientific proposal.  Unfortunately  neither the Wellcome Foundation or Science Museum which have copies of the engraving in their on-line collections had any further information but I eventually tracked down its first appearance to the July 1755 issue of The General Magazine of Arts and Sciences, Philosophical, Philological, Mathematical, and Mechanical edited and published by Benjamin Martin. 

Martin was an interesting character. He was self-educated, became a teacher, wrote a large dictionary that predates Johnson’s more famous one, and later travelled the country giving lectures on natural philosophy.  He also made scientific instruments and had, surprise surprise, written An essay on electricity … being an enquiry into the nature, cause and properties thereof etc etc in 1746. 

The print was accompanied by a short article which  I’m going to quote from to see if I can explain what is supposed to be going on, without being too technical [apologies to anyone with a knowledge of physics, mechanics, hydraulics or electricity for any errors, I failed ‘O’ physics in 1966 and my scientific knowledge probably hasn’t improved much since.]

“As it is our profess’d Design to improve every Discovery for the Public Good, as far as we are able; and as Electricity is now well known to be somewhat more than a Matter of mere Curiosity….

So what’s all that about? How could electricity be a mere curiosity when the 18thc didn’t have it?  It’s true they didn’t  in the sense that we normally use today but they did know about static.  As a child I remember discovering   that  rubbing a comb against my sleeve somehow magically allowed it to pick up tiny scraps of paper.   Of course that phenomenon had been known since antiquity although with references to rubbing pieces of amber rather a cheap plastic comb.  But Martin is right that after that static electricity remained no more than an intellectual curiosity  until 1600 when  William Gilbert published De Magnete , a careful study of electricity and magnetism.

It might appear a big step from the “discovery” of  static electricity to Martin’s claim that  it had been  successfully used to deal with pain.  But in fact it’s not because  since Roman times at least  physicians, including the father of modern medicine Galen,  claimed that the shock patients would get from  a live  torpedo fish could relieve gout and other pain.

Benjamin Martin was promoting electricity being able to do as far more than that.  It was he wrote: ” well known greatly to promote Vegetation in Plants…”   

Have you ever heard of anything so bizarre as electrifying plants to make them grow?  Yet it was widely accepted at the time. I found contemporary accounts saying that a Scot named only  as “Dr. Maimbray”  carried out experiments to do just that in 1746.  Again very little context or further information was ever given to these accounts so I started researching in continental sources and discovered that the man concerned was actually the son of French Huguenot refugees and born in London in 1710. His name was Stephen Charles Triboudet Demainbray, who had studied at Leiden and then  ran a school in Edinburgh for young ladies.  But he had a sideline in electricity.

By 1747 he had experimented on the effect of electricity on plant growth and published a short letter on the subject in the Caledonian Mercury.

So what did Demainbray do?  He  experimented on two young myrtle trees, by simply passing a current through one of them  to the earth using static electricity. To his surprise, the growth of that tree was significantly stimulated, showing greater growth in both the leaves- producing new branches in October out of season – as well as the height of the main trunk. He was convinced   that some sort of “electric fluid” increased the rate of growth in plants.

Although he did not pursue this work further,  others did. The Royal Society heard a paper which described the the experiments of a Mr Baker who electrified a myrtle at the Duke of Montague’s, at Ditton but their observations were  “confined to the divergence of the electrified leaves, and the beautiful appearance of the aura proceeding from the points of the leaves when seen in the dark”.   Other gentleman scientists across Europe picked up on these reports and repeated and extended the experiments."

Did you know that the British Government spent the twenty years between the First and Second World Wars investigating the possibilities of electrifying plants?  And did so  in almost complete secrecy. 

Although Benjamin Martin’s perpetual electrification machine disappeared without trace it clearly didn’t not stop  research and publication about the the effects of electricity on plants continuing on both sides of the Channel…and  less than a hundred years later The farmer’s guide to Scientific and Practical Agriculture announced that “Electricity maybe classed among special manures”  and that was only just the start…

In France, for example, in  the late 1770s,  the wonderfully named Bernard-Germain-Étienne de La Ville-sur-Illon, Comte de Lacépède,  began some experiments watering plants with water which  as he put it had been “impregnated with electrical fluid”. He published a 700+ pages long Essay on Electricity in 1781 which reported his findings that the germination of seeds and the sprouting of bulbs was quicker and  when plants were electrified, they  grew with more vigour than usual.

In 1844 Robert Forster, a Scottish landowner, of Findrassie near Elgin used what he termed “atmospheric electricity” to substantially boost his barley  crop. The details were reported in The British Cultivator in March 1845, local newspapers across the country and Letters on Agricultural Improvement by John Joseph Mechi who added that Forster was still “indefatigably employed in collecting Electro-Cultural facts from our most eminent electricians “.

In the 1880s Professor Karl Selim Lemström of Helsinki  University a geophysicist studying the Aurora Borealis – or Northern Lights – began to wonder if they had an effect on plant growth because he noticed that the trees in the far north grew rapidly despite the short growing season. This led him to start experimenting with  the effects of atmospheric electricity on germination and plant growth.  Lemström’s results  attracted international attention and he was able to conduct some of his later experiments  in collaboration with  other scientists in Sweden, Germany and at Durham College of Science.

Eventually in 1904 he published Electricity in Agriculture and Horticulture in which he offered his detailed  findings that there was  “an increase of the harvest of every kind of plant which has come under treatment, but also a favourable change of their chemical compounds” which made fruit sweeter  and scent stronger etc. 

Around the same time in France the Agricultural Institute at Beauvais under its director Father Paulin began what they hoped were a series of experiments to decide once and for all when this electrical charging worked.

Paulin refined Abbe Berthelon’s electro-vegetatometer devising an atmospheric antenna that he called a geomagnetifere. Installed initially in a field of potatoes, plants within its reach were greener, healthier and produced more potatoes. Later it was tried in vineyards and produced sweeter larger grapes that produced better quality wine.

Britain had particular reasons to be interested  because of food shortages during the First World War caused by a blockade by the German navy. It became a government priority to improve agricultural and  horticultural production so in 1918 a group of British scientists  set up experiments to test the efficacy of electricity at boosting yields. These generally appeared  to show impressive although  not universal increases.      Nevertheless it resulted in considerable interest from the agricultural and horticultural communities who lobbied the government for further research.  In response the Board of Agriculture set up the Electro-Culture Committee  to investigate further.  Membership was impressive: an interdisciplinary mix of physicists, biologists, electrical engineers, and agriculturalists, including a Nobel Prize winner and six  fellows of the Royal Society. It was chaired by  Sir John Snell,  Chairman of the Electricity Commission.

Unfortunately their field trials, based on the idea proposed by Lemstrom,  on  a wide range of crops suffered from several years of bad weather and they were forced to  use plants in pots.  Nevertheless  their results showed  that  the electro-cultural effect was real and promised substantial gains  – but unfortunately that they were also highly erratic and very  hard to control.

Ten years later  in 1936 the British Electrocultural Committee was wound up concluding that there was “little advantage to continue the work either on economic or on scientific grounds… and regret that after so exhaustive a study of this matter the practical results should be so disappointing.”

So electro-culture was clearly now seen officially as a curious but unreliable phenomenon and pursuing it  a waste of time, and once again interest in  it faded away.  However,  David Kinahan, of the  Department of Science and Technology Studies, at University College London, who has researched the committee’s work came up with another interesting fact or two. He discovered in the National Archives that although their annual reports contain many positive facts  these were never  made public because from 1922 onwards  their reports were all marked ‘not for publication’ with only two copies ever printed – one for the minister and another for the archives.   Although the work was not a classified secret he was unable to ascertain why effectively the committee’s findings should have been suppressed like this.

Things were definitely not secret in France where Justin Christofleau,  an  engineer and inventor  wanted do away with chemical fertilisers but still improve plant growth, rejuvenate old plants and deal with many pests and diseases. He experimented in his own potager électrique, or electric vegetable garden using  what he called “electro-magnetic terro-celestial” power. It was well reported in gardening and even national press and  he travelled the world lecturing  eventually writing  it all up in Electroculture  which was also translated into English.

More than that, he patented several devices which went into commercial production. Despite being persecuted for his inventions by lobbyists from the agro-chemical sector, over 150,000 of them were sold before war broke out in 1939 and closed the factory.

But  there was no convincing answer as to why   electricity had these effects.

There were all sorts of theories but no certainty until the great Indian plant physiologist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose devised incredibly sensitive equipment to prove that plants respond physically, in the same way as animals, to electrical impulses.  This was written up in a series of books including Response in the living and non-living [1902] Comparative electro-physiology (1907) and The motor mechanism of plants (1928)

However, despite further research  it was not until 2006 that Andrew Goldsworthy, a plant biotechnologist from Imperial College, put forward what seems like the most likely explanation for what actually caused this reaction. He showed that what is seen in Electro-Cultural experiments is a plant’s natural reaction to a brewing thunderstorm.

Physicists, meteorologists and other scientists please excuse my poor attempt at summarising what I think that means…

Plants need water so plants in dryer location gain an evolutionary advantage if they can quickly maximise their use of sudden downpours, such as produced in a thunderstorm, before it soaks away. Thunderstorms carry  an electrical charge and somehow plants have learned to read that as a signal that heavy rain is imminent.  What  lab experiments showed was that the optimum electrical charge to be applied  to plants to increase yield turned out to be similar to the charge in a thunderstorm.   When it receives the charge a plant activates genes and speeds up its metabolism.

https://thegardenstrust.blog/2021/08/28/the-electric-garden/

https://thegardenstrust.blog/2021/09/04/electroculture/