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--- secret_life_of_plants [2011-04-10 19:03] – cocky
+++ secret_life_of_plants [2011-04-10 19:24] – cocky
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 away from a 727 jet plane** about to take off, caused turnips to sprout much faster than those left silently in the ground. Pg 152
-Allotting one chamber for a control group, Mrs. Dorothy Retallack, a Danish professional organist and mezzo soprano in 1968 used the
+---Allotting one chamber for a control group, Mrs. Dorothy Retallack, a Danish professional organist and mezzo soprano in 1968 used the
 same plants, as in the first experiment,
 setting them in identical soil and affording them equal amounts of water
@@ Line 443: / Line 443: @@
 hours in one chamber** and three hours intermittently in another. In the
 first chamber her plants were **stone dead within two weeks**. In the
-second ·chamber, the plants were much healthier than controls left in
+second chamber, the plants were much healthier than controls left in
 silence.
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+==== Plants and Electromagnetism ====
+<html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/5603665188/" title="Picture 13 by _foam, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5230/5603665188_f014029cea_s.jpg" width="50" height="50" alt="Picture 13"></a></html>---Just as plants respond to the wavelengths of music, so also are they
+continually being **affected by wavelengths of the electromagnetic spec-
+trum**, from earth, moon, planets, cosmos and from a proliferation of
+man-made devices; only it remains to be established exactly which are
+beneficial and which are harmful. Pg 163
+---1747, Jean Antoine Nollet, a French abbot and physics tutor, was informed by a German physicist in Wittenberg that
+water, which normally issued drop by drop from a capillary tube, would
+run out in a constant stream if the tube was electrified. Nollet put several plants in metallic pots next to a conductor and was intrigued to note that the rate of their transpiration
+increased. In a long series of experiments, Nollet carefully weighed **not
+only daffodils but sparrows, pigeons, and cats** and found they **lost weight
+faster if electrified**.
+---Italian physicist, Giuseppe Toaldo reported that in a row of jasmine bushes the two which were next to a lightning conductor grew thirty feet tall whereas all the
+others attained only four feet. Pg 168
+---Bertholon, had a gar-
+dener stand on a slab of insulating material and sprinkle vegetables from
+an electrified watering can. He reported that his salads grew to an
+extraordinary size. He also invented what he called an **"electrovegetometer"** to collect atmospheric electricity by means ot an antenna, and pass
+it through plants growing in a field. "This instrument is
+applicable to all kinds of vegetal production, everywhere, in all weather.”
+---On a clear day in good weather the earth has a negative electrical
+charge while the atmosphere is positive, electrons stream skyward from
+the soil and plants. During storms the polarity is reversed, the earth
+becoming positive and the base of the cloud layer negative. Because
+there are at any time an estimated three to four thousand "electrical"
+storms raging over the surface of the globe, the charges lost by the earth
+in those areas favored by balmy weather are thus replaced, and a seesaw-
+ing balance of electrical gradients maintained. Pg 175
+--As it had been known that sharp points
+were especially attractive to atmospheric electricity, Finish scientist Lemstrom reasoned
+that "**the sharp points of plants acted like lightning rods to collect
+atmospheric electricity** and facilitate the exchange of charges of the air
+and the ground."  Pg 175
+---London Journal of the Horticultural Society published the "**Influence of Electricity on Vegetation**" by an agronomist, Edward Solly, who, suspended wires in the air over
+garden plots, and, tried burying them under the soil. But of
+Solly's seventy experiments with various grains, vegetables, and flowers,
+only nineteen were of any benefit, and nearly as many were harmful.
+The conflicting results of these researchers made it obvious that the
+amount, quality, and duration of electrical stimulation was of crucial
+importance to each form of vegetal life.  Pg 174
+---Lemstrom connected a series of flowers in metal pots to a static genera-
+tor by an overhead network of wires sixteen inches above them and a
+pole set into the soil as a ground. Other pots he "left to nature." After
+eight weeks, the electrified plants, showed gains in weight of nearly 50
+percent over their electrically deprived neighbors. When he transferred
+his apparatus into a garden he not only more than doubled the yield of
+strawberries but found them to be much sweeter; his harvest from barley
+plants increased by one-third. He reported  his success in 1902 in a book //Electro Cultur// The English translation of Lemstrom's book, entitled //**Electricity in
+Agriculture and Horticulture**//.  Pg 176
+---Later Sir Oliver Lodge allowed the
+movement of people, animals, and farm equipment through his **elec-
+trified fields**, by suspending a grid on insulators attached to high poles.
+During one growing season Lodge was able to increase the per-acre yield
+of wheat by 40 percent and was pleased that the
+bakers who used flour ground from it claimed it produced bread of a far
+better quality than that made from the wheat they were normally fur-
+nished. Pg 176