CHAPTER FIVE

The Scottish Barley Craze

By the 1840s electricity had changed. Volta’s battery had given the world steady current. Faraday had shown how magnetism and electricity produce each other. The telegraph was being strung along the railways. Electricity was no longer a spark from a glass globe; it was a force that flowed in wires and did work. And agriculture was changing too: Justus von Liebig had just published his chemistry of plant nutrition, and farmers were hungry for scientific improvement.

Into this moment came a Scottish landowner with a field of barley.

Forster of Findrassie

In 1844 Robert Forster, of Findrassie near Elgin in the north of Scotland, laid out a plot of barley with wires. As the accounts describe it, he buried a wire around the edge of the plot, set poles at the ends on a north–south line, and ran an elevated wire between them joined to the buried one, the idea being to collect atmospheric electricity and lead it through the soil. He reported a barley crop far heavier than that of the surrounding land.

The news ran through the farming press of Britain. Here was a way to raise yields for the price of some wire and a few poles. Through the winter of 1844–45 landowners all over the country prepared plots for the coming season.

The earth battery

At about the same time, across the Atlantic, a William Ross of New York reported on a different method. He buried a sheet of copper at one end of a row of potatoes and a sheet of zinc at the other, and joined the two above ground with a wire. Copper and zinc in moist earth form a weak battery, so a small current really did flow through the soil of the row. Ross reported potatoes several times the size of those in his untreated rows.

This was the first galvanic electroculture, and unlike Forster’s arrangement it involved an actual, if tiny, current. It was also the first electrocultural experiment in which something besides electricity was plainly going on. Zinc and copper are both plant micronutrients, and both dissolve slowly from buried metal. A plot with zinc and copper plates in it is not the same as a plot without them, even if no wire connects them. Nobody in 1844 thought to bury unconnected plates as a control.

1845: the test and the collapse

The season of 1845 was the first mass trial of electroculture, and it went badly for the idea. Dozens of careful gentlemen copied Forster’s arrangement, and most saw nothing. Edward Solly, a chemist working with the Horticultural Society of London, gathered and ran a large series of trials and reported the outcome in the Society’s journal: by his count only a minority showed any benefit, almost as many showed harm, and the rest showed no difference at all. That is the pattern chance produces.

By 1846 the craze was over. The agricultural journals moved on to guano and superphosphate, fertilizers whose effects any farmer could see for himself every time.

What the craze teaches

The barley craze deserves more attention than it gets, because it is the cleanest natural experiment in the history of the passive method. A single striking success was reported. Many independent people tried to reproduce it within one year, with every motive to succeed. It did not reproduce. No company, government or cartel was involved in its failure. Farmers simply stopped doing a thing that did not pay.

The method that was abandoned in 1846, an unpowered wire on poles connected to a wire in the ground, is in every essential the method being sold again today.