He attached electric probes to various vegetables, and claimed to record a “death spasm” in the form of a spike in electrical activity. He hooked a cabbage to a voltmeter in front of the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who was reportedly horrified to witness the electrical “convulsion” of the cabbage as it was dropped in boiling water. Shaw, it must be said, was a vegetarian. Bose also observed how mimosas produced an electric impulse just before their leaflets closed. English scientist John Burdon-Sanderson had first recorded “electrical excitations” in another sensitive plant, the Venus
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