CHAPTER ELEVEN

America Says No

While Britain was testing electroculture and finding something, the United States was testing it and finding nothing.

Arlington Farm

The United States Department of Agriculture had begun electroculture experiments in 1907, at the Arlington Experiment Farm in Virginia, on the ground where the Pentagon now stands. The work was led by Lyman J. Briggs, a physicist who would later direct the National Bureau of Standards and chair the committee that started America’s atomic bomb project. He was, in other words, a physicist of the highest competence, with a physicist’s care about measurement.

Over a number of seasons Briggs and his colleagues A. B. Campbell, R. H. Heald and L. H. Flint ran overhead-network trials on wheat and other crops, measuring the voltage on the wires and the current reaching the plots, and comparing the treated plots with controls far enough away, or screened by earthed wires, to be free of drift. They also grew plants under insulated and earthed cages, repeating Grandeau.

Bulletin 1379

The results appeared in January 1926 as USDA Department Bulletin No. 1379, titled simply Electroculture. The first part reviews the entire history from Maimbray onward and is still one of the best summaries of the early work. The second part reports the Arlington experiments.

The conclusion was negative. The electrified plots did not differ from the controls by more than the controls differed from one another. Of the whole literature the bulletin said that a review of electrocultural experimentation “does not lend assurance of great progress.”

Two governments, two answers

How could Blackman find a twenty-two percent average gain and Briggs find none? Several explanations have been offered, and none can be proved.

• Climate. Lemström and Blackman both found that heat and dry soil turned the effect negative. A Virginia summer is not a Scottish one. The American trials may have been run under just the conditions in which the treatment fails.
• Dose. The currents and daily hours differed. Blackman believed the useful range was narrow.
• Chance and bias. The British effect may have been a run of luck in unreplicated plots, helped by the natural hopes of the experimenters. On this reading Briggs simply got the right answer first.

What can be said is that the American bulletin, unlike the British reports, was printed and distributed in the ordinary way to every agricultural library in the country. For American agronomists it closed the subject. It is in the public domain and can be read free online today, which is worth remembering when one is told that governments concealed the research. The most widely circulated official document on electroculture ever published is one that says it does not work.