Justin Christofleau and His Electroculture Apparatus

Who was Justin Christofleau?

Justin Christofleau was a French inventor and promoter whose electroculture apparatus sold in Europe and Australia in the 1920s. The title page of his English booklet lists him as a Knight of Merit of Agriculture, a Gold Medallist of the Society of Encouragement for National Industries and a member of the Society of Scientists and Inventors of France. The Perth agents called him "a well-known French scientist", but the booklet gives no degree or academic post.

Press extracts in the booklet place him "at the village of La Queue-les-Yvelines, near the forest of Rambouillet" in 1921, and the Iowa station later ordered its apparatus from that address. French patent records on Google Patents list a Justin-Etienne Christofleau as inventor on filings that run from an aero-hydraulic motor (1902) and bakery-oven equipment (1904) to an atmospheric engine (1917), a "réseau thermo-magnétique moto-solaire" for raising farm output (FR 528,468, filed 12 June 1920, published 12 November 1921) and an "Appareil d'électroculture" (FR 683,614, filed 1929). He was, in other words, a working inventor with many interests, of whom electroculture was the best known.

What did Christofleau's apparatus look like?

Christofleau's apparatus was a metal head on a tall wooden post, wired to a long buried wire. The booklet's description (printed pp. 7–11) is exact. The head carried a fan of thin upward "aerial" wires and a vertical point, plus a long sideways pointer set toward magnetic south. On top sat a zinc dish with a copper plate riveted to it, called a "voltaic pile" that worked with rain; on the stem was a soldered copper–zinc tube, called a "thermo electric pile" that worked with sunshine.

The head went on a 25 ft post of dry timber, buried 5 ft, leaving about 20 ft in the air, with tarred ends and three guy wires. A No. 12 soft galvanised iron wire ran down the post beside four porcelain insulators, turned at a buried double insulator, and ran 10 in deep in a straight furrow "direct magnetic North" for the length of the field. The booklet said the apparatus "influences a strip of ground 14ft. wide" and that it worked only if aligned exactly.

Three details matter for anyone comparing it with today's products. The buried wire was galvanised iron, not copper. There is no coil anywhere. And the booklet never reports a voltage or current reading, so the claim that it fed electricity into the soil was never measured by its maker. For how that design relates to modern stakes, see electroculture antenna designs.

What did Christofleau claim in his 1927 book?

Christofleau's booklet claimed almost everything a grower could want: yields up "100 to 200 per cent. and more", no need for fertiliser, destruction of insects and parasites, cures for mildew, phylloxera and curl-leaf, and sweeter, earlier crops. It also claimed "upwards of a million apparatus in use" and that the device was "patented throughout the world". These are promotional claims with no data behind them in the booklet.

The booklet contradicts itself in places. It tells growers to "use manure for the first year, as if the apparatus were not there", despite the no-fertiliser promise. One contributor says the current flows from south to north and another says north to south. The only patent wording is the agents' phrase and two press quotes; no number, country or year is printed, and the "631,588" on the scanned cover is a library shelf mark.

The firmest-looking evidence in the booklet is thin when read closely:

• Metz, 1921. A one-paragraph note from the agricultural station of Metz said a bean plot with the apparatus produced "THREE TIMES the crop" of its comparison plot in a drought year. No weights or plot sizes are given, and the note itself asks for two or three more years of trials.
• The Claret vineyard, 1922. A court bailiff watched 924 electrified vines produce 100 tubs (comportes) of grapes. The grower said 2,000 manured vines elsewhere gave 199 tubs, a figure nobody witnessed. That works out to about 0.108 against 0.0995 tubs per vine: roughly 9 per cent more.
• Everything else is customer letters, press clippings and photographs of tall peas, beans and clover with no comparison plot in view.

Were Christofleau's results ever tested?

Yes: Christofleau's own apparatus was tested in a controlled trial, and it made no measurable difference. Charles Dorchester of Iowa State College set up five atmospheric collectors along a field at the Ames Agronomy Farm, including "one original Christofleau apparatus" bought from La Queue-les-Yvelines, each feeding buried cables under crop plots. Over 1930–32, the six crops (corn, soybeans, turnips, chard, beets, string beans) came out between 3.95 per cent below and 11.05 per cent above their controls, which Dorchester judged within experimental error. The collectors passed currents of only about a billionth of an amp in fair weather (Iowa Research Bulletin 210, March 1937).

A 2026 review by a plasma physicist reaches the same view. Thierry Dufour's 2026 history of plasma agriculture describes the antenna as "behaving more like a lightning rod than a genuine energy transfer system", and says Christofleau's bean photographs compared plots that differed in fertiliser, soil, season and rainfall. His companion model of an 18th-century collector found that a passive mast concentrates the fair-weather field only within millimetres to centimetres of its tips. The wider evidence is summarised on does electroculture work.

Christofleau's apparatus in numbers

• 25 ftPost length in the booklet, 5 ft of it buriedChristofleau, Electroculture (c. 1927), p. 10
• 14 ftWidth of soil strip the booklet claimed one apparatus treatedChristofleau, Electroculture (c. 1927), p. 12
• about 9%Per-vine gain implied by the booklet's own 1922 vineyard figuresChristofleau, Electroculture (c. 1927), p. 45
• 6 cropsTested under Iowa's collectors, including a Christofleau, with no gain beyond errorIowa Research Bulletin 210 (1937)
• 1920Filing year of Christofleau's French patent FR 528,468Google Patents record
• 1926Year the USDA reviewed electroculture and did not recommend itUSDA Bulletin 1379

Where can you read Christofleau's electroculture book?

The English booklet Electroculture survives as a 62-page scan of a copy from the Parliamentary Library in Canberra; it carries no printed date, but its latest dated items are newspapers of July 1927. We have not found a library-hosted public copy to link, and copies circulating on file-sharing sites and social media groups are unofficial uploads. The Iowa bulletin cites an earlier French edition, Augmentation des récoltes et sauvetage des arbres malades par l'électroculture (La Queue-les-Yvelines, 1923), and Dufour cites a 1925 French title reprinted by Éditions Permafutur. Our electroculture books page explains where the legitimate public-domain classics can be read.

Can you buy a Christofleau-style apparatus today?

Yes. Thrive Garden, run by the people behind this library, sells the Electroculture Antenna Apparatus (a store we own) at $1,499 (the store's price, checked October 2026), a modern apparatus the store describes as "based on Justin Christofleau's patent". We have not compared its parts with the booklet's drawing piece by piece. The store's listing describes the device in terms of "magnetic water", an idea that does not appear in the 1927 booklet; read it as the store's framing, not Christofleau's.

Buy it, if at all, as a striking piece of electroculture history or a garden centrepiece, not as a yield booster: the one controlled test of an original found no effect. If you want to judge it yourself, set up matched plots on both sides of the buried wire and follow our guide to a fair side-by-side trial.

Common questions

More from the archive

• HistoryElectroculture history
• HistoryThe 1926 USDA electroculture report
• AntennasElectroculture antennas
• Try itHow to test electroculture