Abstract
THE results obtained by culture under the influence of electric light are fairly well known, and the growing of lettuce for salads, in spacious greenhouses with the aid of electric light, is already a profitable industrial pursuit in the United States (near Chicago and elsewhere). However, the use of electric currents for stimulating vegetation, although it was studied more than fifty years ago (by Ross, in 1844–46; continued by Forster, Sheppard, Fichtner, &c.), still remains unsettled. A communication upon this subject, made by a Russian engineer, V. A. Tyurin, before the St. Petersburg Electro-Technical Society, contains some welcome information upon the work done in this direction in Russia by M. Spyeshneff and M. Kravkoff. The former experimented a few years ago on three different lines. Repeating well-known experiments on electrified seeds, he ascertained once more that such seeds germinated more rapidly, and gave better fruit and better crops (from two and a half to six times higher), than seeds that had not been submitted to preliminary electrification. Repeating next the experiments of Ross—that is, burying in the soil one copper and one zinc plate, placed vertically and connected by a wire, he found that potatoes and roots grown in the electrified space gave crops three times heavier than those which were grown close by on a test plot; the carrots attained a quite unusual size, of from ten to twelve inches in diameter. Spyeshneff's third series of experiments was more original. He planted on his experimental plot, about ten yards apart, wooden posts provided at their tops with metallic aigrettes connected together by wires, so as to cultivate his plants under a sort of network of wires. He obtained some striking results, one of which was that the growth and the ripening of barley were accelerated by twelve days. Quite recently M. Kravkoff undertook a series of laboratory experiments upon boxes of soil submitted to electric currents. The temperature of the soil was raised by these currents; its moisture decreased first, but began to increase after a course of three weeks (the same increase of moisture was also noticed by Fichtner); and finally, the amount of vegetable matter in the soil was increased by the electric currents. With what is now known upon the influence of micro-organisms upon vegetation, further research on similar lines is most desirable and very promising.
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Electro-Culture . Nature 61, 602 (1900). https://doi.org/10.1038/061602a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/061602a0