Electroculture Antenna Designs, With Diagrams

What electroculture antenna designs exist?

Five electroculture antenna designs have a documented source: a pointed mast, a branched pole wired into the soil, Christofleau's multi-part mast head, Lakhovsky's open copper ring, and the copper coil on a stake. Everything sold today, from butterfly stakes to spiral "Tesla" coils, is a variation on the last of these.

The older designs were big. They stood on posts 20 ft or more high and fed long buried wires, because their inventors believed height gathered more atmospheric electricity. The modern coil shrank the idea to a garden stake under 40 cm, with no buried network at all. For the products built on these designs, see electroculture antennas.

Where did each design come from?

Each electroculture antenna design came out of a particular moment in the history of electricity. Bertholon's mast followed Franklin's lightning rod by about thirty years; Paulin's and Christofleau's poles came from the late-19th-century enthusiasm for atmospheric electricity; Lakhovsky's ring came from early radio, where a coil and a gap make a tuned circuit.

• Bertholon, 1783. His book De l'électricité des végétaux introduced the electro-vegetometer, a tall insulated mast with a metal point that led collected charge to a crown of points held over plants. Dufour (2026) notes it "recorded neither electric field, nor electrical charge, nor current".
• Paulin, from 1891. Hull's Electro-Horticulture (1898), pp. 9–10, describes "a tall, resinous pole" carrying a galvanised iron rod on porcelain knobs that ended "in five pointed branches", wired to a network under the soil. A local committee reported potato yields 50–75% higher inside the wired circle, a historical report without modern controls.
• Christofleau, 1920s. A French inventor at La Queue-les-Yvelines, he sold his apparatus through agents for £6; see Justin Christofleau.
• Lakhovsky, 1925. His open ring dates from 1925; his later US patent 1,962,565, granted in 1934, covers an "apparatus with circuits oscillating under multiple wave lengths". The garden version is a single open ring; see the Lakhovsky coil.
• The copper coil. No historical document in our library describes copper wire wound on a wooden stake. It appears in hobby literature and online guides, and is the design tested in 2025.

What did Christofleau's design look like?

Christofleau's design was a small metal head on a 25 ft wooden post, buried 5 ft so that about 20 ft stood above ground. His booklet Electroculture (c. 1927) labels each part of the engraving on printed page 7, and describes the installation on pages 10–11.

From the top: a fan of about 12 thin upward "aerial" wires, which he labelled as "vibrating wires under the action of the wind"; a vertical point; a long horizontal pointer aimed at magnetic south and labelled "Telluric Currents"; a casing he called an "Electric Depot"; a copper–zinc tube he called a "thermo electric pile"; and a zinc saucer with a riveted copper plate, his "voltaic pile", meant to catch rain. A No. 12 galvanised iron wire ran from a bolt on the head down the post on four porcelain insulators, then turned underground and ran 10 in deep toward magnetic north. He claimed it treated a strip 14 ft wide along the wire.

Three things the booklet does not contain matter for anyone copying it. It gives no voltage or current reading. It names no metal for the casing or aerial wires. And there is no copper coil anywhere: the buried conductor is galvanised iron. The peer-reviewed review by Dufour (2026) concludes the device behaved "more like a lightning rod than a genuine energy transfer system".

Is there a best electroculture antenna design?

No electroculture antenna design has shown a crop benefit in a controlled trial, so there is no best design on the evidence. The two designs that were tested against untreated plots both came out within normal plot-to-plot variation.

Design numbers from the sources

• 28 ftHeight of Paulin's geomagnetifer pole (historical report)Hull, Electro-Horticulture, 1898, pp. 9–10
• 20 ftHeight of Christofleau's apparatus above groundChristofleau, Electroculture, c. 1927, p. 10
• 175–700×Field concentration at the tips of a Bertholon-type mast, confined to mm–cmDufour 2026, Comptes Rendus Mécanique
• 40 cmLength of the copper-coiled dowels in the 2025 trialChier et al. 2025, PLoS One

At Iowa State College from 1930 to 1932, Charles Dorchester ran five atmospheric collectors, including one original Christofleau apparatus, into buried copper cables. Six crops gave yields from about 4% below to 11% above control, all within experimental error. In 2025, Chier and colleagues tested copper coiled on dowels, exposed or buried, beside four vegetables for 8 weeks. Only buried copper nudged beet and turnip leaf mass up by about 2.5 g, and the authors judged the overall result inconsistent. If you pick a design, pick it for cost, looks and ease of comparison; does electroculture work sets out the full record.

How do coil direction and height differ between designs?

Height varies by a factor of about 20 between the historical masts and modern stakes, while coil direction is a modern rule with no documented test behind it. Christofleau's only direction rule was a compass one: pointer to magnetic south, buried wire to magnetic north, which his booklet called "absolutely essential".

Height matters physically because the fair-weather field is roughly 100 V per metre. A 40 cm stake therefore spans about 4 V (a 29 cm stake about 3 V), which Chier's team calculated before measuring only about 2 mV actually reaching the soil. Christofleau's 20 ft head sat in a gradient several hundred volts higher than its base, yet Iowa still found only small differences within experimental error. Dufour's model adds that tip shape and angle barely changed the result once a mast was present.

Winding direction is different. Thrive Garden's Tesla Coil antenna (a store we own) is listed as wound clockwise; some hobby guides say counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere, without citing any trial. No controlled study has compared the two. For placement choices, see antenna placement, and for the physics, atmospheric electricity and plants.

Where can you find antenna design diagrams?

The original electroculture antenna diagrams are in public-domain books and patents, most of them free to read online. These five are the primary sources worth opening before copying any design:

1. Christofleau, Electroculture (c. 1927). The labelled engraving, installation plans for fields, vines and single trees, and the buried-wire layout. Our electroculture books page describes the edition.
2. Hull, Electro-Horticulture (1898). No drawings, but word descriptions of Paulin's geomagnetifer and Spechnew's pointed poles, readable at archive.org.
3. USDA Department Bulletin 1379 (1926). Photographs of the Arlington overhead wire networks, the high-voltage design the USDA tested, at the Library of Congress.
4. Lakhovsky's US patent 1,962,565 (1934). Circuit drawings and the spiral ring, on Google Patents.
5. Dufour (2026). A modern reconstruction of Bertholon's mast with modelled field lines, open access.

For a garden-scale build from these ideas, see how to make an electroculture antenna. If you would rather start with ready-made stakes, Thrive Garden's Copper Butterfly stakes (a store we own) are listed as 10-gauge copper and cost $39.95 for 3 (store price, October 2026). Either way, plan the comparison first with how to test electroculture.

Common questions

Related guides

• AntennasElectroculture antennas
• HistoryJustin Christofleau
• HistoryThe Lakhovsky coil
• AntennasHow to make an electroculture antenna