CHAPTER TWELVE

Christofleau, Lakhovsky, and the Antenna Dream

While government scientists strung powered wires over oat fields, a different electroculture was being born in France, one that needed no power at all. It is this French tradition, not the British one, that today’s copper coils descend from.

Justin Christofleau

Justin Christofleau was an inventor living at La Queue-les-Yvelines, west of Paris. In the years around the First World War he patented and sold what he called an electro-magnetic terro-celestial apparatus. It was a tall pole carrying a metal arm aligned north and south, with points to gather atmospheric electricity, elements meant to produce current from the sun’s heat and from differences between metals, and galvanized wires leading down and running under the soil along the rows.

Christofleau’s claims were enormous. In his book Electroculture, issued in English in 1927, he described crops doubled and tripled, cereals over seven feet tall, vines cured of phylloxera, exhausted land restored, and all without manure or chemical fertilizer. He stated that he held honors from learned societies and that well over a hundred thousand of his devices were in use.

Three things should be said plainly. First, these figures come from Christofleau, a man selling the apparatus. I have found no independent trial, by an agricultural station or anyone without a stake, that confirms them. Second, the often-repeated story that his invention was suppressed, or that a foreign power offered him millions for the rights, likewise rests on promotional literature; I have found no document that supports it. Third, his device was a passive collector of the same family as Forster’s wires of 1844, which had failed in open trial eighty years before.

Christofleau’s lasting contribution was not a result. It was a picture: the aerial on a pole, pointing north, drawing down the energy of the sky. That picture is on a thousand websites now.

Georges Lakhovsky

Georges Lakhovsky was a Russian-born engineer living in Paris, and his ideas were stranger and more ambitious. He proposed that every living cell is a tiny oscillating electrical circuit, that health is the proper oscillation of the cells, and that disease is a disturbance of it that the right external field could correct.

In the mid-1920s he carried out his most famous experiment. Geraniums were inoculated with the bacterium that causes crown gall, a plant tumor. Around some of the plants he placed a single open ring of heavy copper wire, about a foot across, held on an insulating stake and connected to nothing. He reported that the ringed plants shed their tumors and thrived while the others died. His photographs of the geraniums were printed in his books, among them the one known in English as The Secret of Life.

The Lakhovsky coil is the direct original of the modern copper ring and spiral. And its evidence is what you have just read: a handful of plants, in one man’s hands, in the 1920s. Crown gall tumors do sometimes dry up and fall away on their own, and plants vary greatly in how they tolerate them. I know of no controlled replication that has confirmed the result in the century since.

Two roads

By 1930 there were therefore two electrocultures, and they had little to do with each other.

One was powered, measured, tested by governments, and had produced a real if unreliable effect in careful hands. It was about to be abandoned as uneconomic.

The other was passive, unmeasured, promoted by its inventors, and had never passed an independent trial. It was about to go underground, into the literature of dowsing, cosmic rays and alternative agriculture, where it would survive for ninety years and from which it would return, in our own decade, on a telephone screen.

Much of the present confusion comes from this: the modern movement uses the devices of the second tradition and cites the evidence of the first.