Word: backster
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...prim gown of laboratory respectability. In it are researchers like Cleve Backster, a lie-detector expert who attached the terminals of his machines to plants. Behold! The vegetation reacted to his thoughts...
Most scientists have greeted the experiments with open skepticism?with good reason. After his plants would not respond for a visiting Canadian plant physiologist, for example, Backster offered an interesting hypothesis: the plants "fainted" because they sensed that she routinely incinerated her own plants and then weighed the ashes after her experiments...
...Backster is the essence of conservatism compared with the book's more adventurous researchers. A New Jersey electronics buff, Pierre Paul Sauvin, attached a Rube Goldbergian machine to his plants, and then spent the weekend with his girl friend at a place 80 miles away. He found that even at that distance the plants had responded to his sexual relations with the girl. The tone oscillators went "right off the top," he says, at the moment of orgasm...
...trimotored Fokker planes which Financier Loewenstein habitually described as his "flying offices." In the crew's compartment were Pilot Ronald Drew and Mechanic Robert F. Little. In the "office" flew British Stenographer Miss Edith Clarke and French Stenographer Mlle. Paule Bidalon. Also on board were Valet Frederick Baxter Backster and Secretary J. O. Hodgson. Three mighty engines thrashed the air around the plane into a 300 mile an hour gale, thrusting the Fokker across the English Channel at 100 miles per hour...
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