Arizona republican., 1919-03-09
USE ELECTRICITY
 AS AID TO CROPS
est. Louis Post Dispatch)

(St Louis Post Dispatch)
 Next spring, when you get ready to plant beans, corn. tomatoes ana the like in your back yard, don't stop with Just putting a fence around your garden.
 Put one under it. too
 Then put trap on a pole that will snare electricity from the air and con meet it with your underground fence" If you have the same sort of luck with your crops as did the Missouri Botani- cal Garden tShaw's Garden) in St. Louis, you will find that your seeds germinate earlier your plants ripen quicker and bear greater quantity of fruit
 Experts at the garden have just com pleted a three-year test of an appara- tus invented by Henri de Graffigny Frenchman, called the "Electrifier,r which produced those results. Unlike most other appliances previously used in experiments to stimulate plant growth by electricity, de Graffigny's apparatus takes it's electricity right out of the air. And scientists say that the static conditions of the Mississippi valley are more pronounced perhaps ! than any other section of the globe. De Graffignys mechanism would per init hundreds of thousands of back yard gardeners to take current from the air day and night and keep on after dark even, by static electric currents. the growth that we commonly think is forced only by the suns rays in the daytime. The machine used here is one of halt dozen in the United States.
 The officials at Shaws Garden state explicitly that they make no claims for | De Graffignys apparatus and they don't know whether it really does what l it's inventor claims or not. But they | do know and state without equivoca | tion that they got results on an elec- | trified plot that were nowhere equale6 l by the results on an identically simi- ] lar plot that was not electrified and i which was used as check. | For instance, on the electrified plot i tomatoes ripened two weeks earlier l than on a nonelectrified plot corn ripened ten days earlier and beans about a week earlier Tomatoes aver aged about ten to the plant on the electrified plot and five to the plant on 1 the electrified plot. Corn and beans showed no difference in yield, | but the plants were larger on the elec- ] trified plot.
  sists of q so-called electrifier con | structed of bronze, with five prongs of pure nickel, nonrustible and infusible, a copper wire attached to the bottom of the bronze part, pole fifteen to l thirty-five feet long, a switch, gal vanized iron pulley, with an eye Tor fastening to the pole, tarred rope for sliding the electrifier down to the base and wto porcelains for attaching the rope to the pole.
 The apparatus was set up In the tol- lowing manner:
 The soil was removed to a depth oi
 one and one-half feet, the radius oi
 the plot was made equal to the lenStf
 of the pole, the pulley was affixed tc
 the top of the pole, while the switch
 and the porcelains were affixed neal
 the base. the tarred rope was passed
 through the pulley in order to permit
 of lowering the electrifier t3 examine
 the points occasionally. The pole was
 then placed in the ground deep enouef
 to be absolutely stable, one-eiShth mel
 galvanized iron wire Was stretched
 every three feet at the base of tho
 pole in parallel strands and connected
 with the copper wire attached 10 th'