CHAPTER EIGHT

Lodge, Newman, and Evesham

Sir Oliver Lodge was one of the most celebrated physicists in Britain, a pioneer of radio, principal of the University of Birmingham, and a man with a gift for making electrical machinery work. J. E. Newman was a practical agriculturist in the fruit-and-vegetable country of the Vale of Evesham. Around 1906 the two men, with the grower R. Bomford, set out to do Lemström’s experiment on a commercial scale.

Solving the machine problem

Lemström’s influence machine was the weak point. Lodge replaced it. He used an induction coil to step ordinary current up to a very high voltage, and his own mercury-vapor valves to rectify it, so that the overhead wires received a steady charge of one sign. The wires were raised high enough, some fifteen feet, for horses and wagons to work beneath them. The system could now be switched on in any weather and run for hours daily across many acres.

The Lodge–Newman installation was, for its day, serious engineering: a powered line at tens of thousands of volts over roughly twenty acres of farmland. It was nothing like a coil in a flowerpot.

The wheat

In the first seasons the results looked excellent. Wheat under the wires was reported to yield roughly thirty to forty percent more grain than the control area, and millers reportedly judged the electrified grain of better baking quality. Strawberries and other crops were also said to benefit. The reports were published, Lodge lectured on them, and a company, the Agricultural Electric Discharge Company, was formed to sell the apparatus. Installations were tried in Britain and abroad.

Dumfries

One of the most persistent experimenters was a Scottish landowner, Miss E. C. Dudgeon of Lincluden, near Dumfries. From 1911 she ran overhead-discharge trials on potatoes and then on oats, keeping records season after season, and she reported substantial increases in several years, including a large gain in oats in 1916. Her field at Lincluden would become one of the official government test sites.

The doubts

Even at the height of the enthusiasm there were reasons for caution, and the more careful workers stated them. In 1914 two scientists at the University of Leeds, Ingvar Jørgensen and J. H. Priestley, reviewed the field. They pointed out a problem that had been hiding in every overhead-wire experiment: the electric discharge does not stay over the treated plot. The wind carries the charged air sideways, sometimes a long way. A “control” plot beside the electrified one may be receiving a share of the treatment. Controls placed too near would hide a real effect; controls placed far away were on different soil.

There was also the plain matter of plot design. The Evesham comparison set one large treated area against one large untreated area. However big the fields, that is a sample of one. If the treated field happened to be better land, the electricity would get the credit.

So by 1914 the position was this. A powered method existed. Reputable people on several farms had reported gains of twenty to fifty percent. But the trials were unreplicated, the controls were doubtful, and nobody could explain the effect.

Then the war came. German submarines began sinking the ships that carried Britain’s wheat, the country came within weeks of running short of bread, and anything that might raise the home harvest by a third became a matter of national survival. The government decided to find out, properly and at public expense, whether electroculture was real.