CHAPTER TWO

The Electric Century

In the 1740s electricity was the most exciting thing in the world. The friction machine, a glass globe spun against a hand or a leather pad, could now produce sparks on demand. In 1745 and 1746 the Leyden jar arrived, the first device that could store a charge, and suddenly a line of monks or soldiers holding hands could be made to jump in unison. Electricity was a parlor entertainment and a philosophical mystery at once, and natural philosophers pointed it at everything they could reach: water, metals, animals, the sick, and the dead.

It was only a matter of time before someone pointed it at a plant.

Maimbray’s myrtles

The man usually given credit is a Dr. Maimbray (the name is also spelled Mainbray) of Edinburgh. In the autumn of 1746 he electrified two myrtle trees through the month of October and reported that they put out new shoots and buds, at a season when neighboring myrtles left alone did not. The report was brief. It had no measurements worth the name, no repeated trials, and two plants. But it was published and talked about, and it started something.

Within a year or two the experiment was being repeated across Europe. The most important of those who repeated it was a French clergyman.

The Abbé Nollet

Jean-Antoine Nollet was the leading electrical experimenter in France, a priest of the Church, a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, and the man who taught physics to the royal family. He was also careful, by the standards of the day. He sowed seeds, mustard among them, in matching metal pots, kept the pots side by side, and electrified one set for hours each day while leaving the other alone. The electrified seeds, he reported, sprouted sooner and grew faster in their first days.

Nollet was cautious about what this meant. He noticed that electrified bodies lose moisture faster, and he suspected that electricity was speeding the movement of fluids through the plant rather than adding some new principle of life. That guess, that an electric field changes how water and dissolved substances move, is still one of the leading explanations offered today.

Others reported the same thing: Jean Jallabert in Geneva, Georg Matthias Bose in Wittenberg, and experimenters in Italy and England. By about 1750 it was widely accepted among electricians that electricity quickened vegetation.

What these experiments were, and were not

It is worth being exact about what the first electroculturists did, because their work is often cited today as proof of something it never tested.

They used powered electricity, generated by a machine, applied directly to a potted plant for hours at a time. They did not use antennas, coils or the atmosphere. Their samples were tiny, a pot or two. There was no randomization, no statistics, and little control over the things that actually govern seedling growth: warmth, light, and water. An electrified pot sitting near a busy experimenter and his machine is not in the same conditions as a pot left in the corner.

So the fair summary of the 1740s is this. Several competent men independently reported that strong static electrification speeds germination and early growth. Their methods could not rule out ordinary explanations. They had raised a real question and had not answered it.

One generation later a second French priest took the question out of the laboratory and into the garden, and in doing so invented the idea that still drives electroculture today: that the electricity plants need is already in the sky, free for the taking.