CHAPTER TEN

The Electro-Culture Committee

In 1918 the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, under its president Rowland Prothero, later Lord Ernle, appointed an Electro-Culture Committee. Its chairman was Sir John Snell, soon to be head of the Electricity Commission and the country’s senior electrical engineer. Blackman was its leading scientific member. Its task was to settle by experiment whether electrical treatment could raise the national harvest.

No other government had done or has done anything quite like it. For eighteen years a standing official committee, with public money, engineers, physiologists and experimental farms, tested electroculture.

Eighteen years

The work fell into two streams. Field trials continued at Rothamsted, Harper Adams, Lincluden and elsewhere. Pot-culture and laboratory work, increasingly the larger part, was carried on at Rothamsted and at Imperial College. The Committee reported to the Ministry each year in a series of Interim Reports.

The early reports were encouraging, and they are the source of Blackman’s published figures. Pot cultures of barley, oats and maize continued through the 1920s to show increases under discharge more often than not. The Committee tested different voltages, currents, times of day and stages of growth, looking for the conditions that would make the effect dependable. It learned some things: that very small currents did as well as larger ones, that excessive discharge did harm, that treatment in the first weeks mattered most.

What it never learned was how to make the effect reliable. Good seasons were followed by null ones. Through the early 1930s, as trial design improved and replication increased, the measured gains grew smaller and less consistent. This is the usual fate of a small or fragile effect when experiments become more rigorous, and it is also the usual fate of an effect that was never there. The Committee’s data cannot tell us which.

The end

In 1936 the Committee recommended its own dissolution. Its final report said there was “little advantage to continue the work either on economic or on scientific grounds,” and expressed regret “that after so exhaustive a study of this matter the practical results should be so disappointing.” The eighteenth and last Interim Report was issued in February 1937.

The reports nobody read

Here we reach the one episode in this history that gives real substance to the feeling that electroculture was hidden.

The Committee’s reports were not published in the ordinary way. According to the historian David Kinahan, who studied the Committee’s papers for a dissertation in 2009, only the earliest reports were put on general sale; the rest were produced in small numbers for official circulation. The full set sits today in the National Archives at Kew, in file MAF 33/913. A scientist of the 1940s or 1960s who wanted to know what the British government had found would have had trouble finding out.

The reports were not classified. There is no record of an order to suppress them. But the practical effect of a government putting eighteen years of results in a filing cabinet is much the same as hiding them, and it helps explain why later researchers so often started from nothing. We will come back to this in Part Four, because it matters.

For now, note what the documents contain. They do not record a triumphant success that was then buried. They record a real but erratic effect that the best people available could not tame, set aside by a government in the middle of the Depression.