CHAPTER SEVEN

Lemström and the Northern Lights

Karl Selim Lemström was professor of physics at the University of Helsinki, and his subject was the aurora. He led expeditions to Lapland and to Spitsbergen to study it. He believed, as many then did, that the northern lights were an electrical discharge from the earth to the upper air, and on mountaintops in Lapland he set up networks of pointed wires to try to produce an artificial auroral glow.

While he was in the Arctic he noticed the plants.

The observation

Vegetation in the far north has only a few weeks of summer, yet it grows with astonishing speed and vigor. Rye and barley ripen in a season too short, by southern reckoning, to ripen anything. The usual explanation is the long daylight of the polar summer, and that explanation is correct. But Lemström was struck by something else. Studying the growth rings of northern pines, he believed he saw the wide rings fall in years of strong auroras and sunspot maxima. And he observed that the needles of conifers and the awns of barley are sharp points, the very shape an electrician uses to draw current from the air.

His conclusion was that the high-latitude atmosphere, with its strong electrical currents, was feeding the plants through their points. He set out to test it.

The method

Beginning in 1885, Lemström did what no one before him had done. Over a plot of crops he stretched a network of thin wires on insulated posts, with short metal points hanging down toward the plants. He connected the network to one pole of an influence machine, a large static generator, and the other pole to a plate buried in the earth. The crop now stood in a steady, artificially maintained electric field many times stronger than nature’s, with a minute current passing from the points through the air to the plants and the ground.

This is the overhead-discharge system. In its essentials it is the method the British government would test thirty years later, and the method running in Chinese greenhouses today. Lemström invented it.

The results

He ran trials for years, first in Finland, then with collaborators in Burgundy, in Germany, and in England at the Durham College of Science in Newcastle. He tested cereals, root crops, strawberries, beans and more. He reported increases for most crops, commonly in the range of a third to a half more than the unelectrified control, along with earlier ripening and sweeter fruit.

He also reported something that later workers would confirm and that gives his account the ring of honest observation: the treatment could do harm. Applied in strong sunshine and heat, it damaged the crop. On dry soil without irrigation it reduced the yield. Some plants, such as cabbages and turnips, did not respond or responded badly unless well watered. An inventor merely selling a wonder does not usually list the ways it fails.

The book

In 1904, the year of his death, his results appeared in English as Electricity in Agriculture and Horticulture. It is short and clearly written, and it is in the public domain, free to read today in online libraries. It is the first place a serious student of electroculture should go.

Lemström’s weaknesses were those of his time. His plots were small and seldom replicated. Control and treated plots sat side by side without the randomization that guards against a good strip of soil. A hand-turned or motor-driven static machine was unreliable in damp weather, exactly when crops were growing. But he had turned electroculture from an anecdote into a specified, repeatable procedure. Anyone could now build his apparatus and check.

In England, a famous physicist and a practical farmer decided to do so.