Fixing the Sky (10 page)

1.4 Rainmaking old and new.

(CARTOON BY CHARLES ADDAMS, IN CLARKE, “MAN-MADE WEATHER”)

Commercial cloud seeding even found its way into the cartoons. The Warner Brothers Looney Tune
Porky the Rain-Maker
was shown in theaters in 1936. During a devastating drought, Porky sends his son to town with his last dollar to buy feed for the starving animals. There, next to the feed store, Dr. Quack is selling an assortment of “rain pills” for $1 from the back of his wagon. As part of his presentation, Quack hands out umbrellas to the crowd and launches a rain pill into the sky with a peashooter. The pill bursts like Dyrenforth's ordnance, and rain begins to fall immediately.

Convinced, Porky Jr. buys a box of the pills with the family's last dollar, but his angry father, in a scene reminiscent of Jack and the Magic Beanstalk, throws them on the ground. This gives rise to a series of comedic shticks. A barnyard chicken eats a lightning pill and is instantly electrified; the old gray mare eats a fog pill and is shrouded in cloud; the goose eats thunder and wind pills and all hell breaks loose. When, in the melee, one of the rain pills reaches the sky, clouds form instantly and the rains fall. As the cartoon credits roll, all ends well on the farm and everyone is happy. “That's all Folks!”

In
Walt Disney
'
s Comics and Stories
(1953), Donald Duck, M.R.M. (Master Rain Maker), has perfected the science of rainmaking. In the opening sequence, a farmer orders 2 inches of rain on his barley field. Donald, wearing an aviator's helmet and pointing to his bag of M-3 “rain seed,” offers him 2.5 inches for the same price. Donald fulfills his contract with extreme precision “to the millimeter” by seeding the farmer's X-shaped field with an X-shaped cloud he has “bulldozed” into position. The farmer and his wife are delighted, since none of the rain falls on his hay field next door: “That duck shore is a Jim Dandy! It's raining right up to the fence row! And the drops that fall on the line even have one flat side!”

Of course, Donald eventually loses his temper in every cartoon, and this one is no exception. Daisy has gone to the Idle Dandies picnic with Donald's cousin, Gladstone. Donald, jealous and angry, takes off in his cloud-seeding airplane, this time loaded with “snow starter,” to gain retribution. Flying over the picnic site in Greenwood Canyon in a clear blue sky, Donald's agitation with his rival increases until he admits, “I feel mean enough now to do
anything
!” After herding some ominous rain clouds together, Donald declares, “I won't give 'em ... anything as common as a cloudburst—I'll give 'em a
blizzard
!” In a memorable image, he pulls the control lever beyond “rain,” “hail,” and “snow” all the way to “blizzard,” but he miscalculates and “overseeds” the clouds, turning them into a solid dome of ice.

Donald crashes his plane on the ice and parachutes down into the canyon to warn the picnickers of the danger above. The ice dome crashes down on their parked cars, but since this is a Disney cartoon, no one is injured. However, to avoid liability and preserve deniability, Donald suspends his lucrative rain business, sneaks away from the ongoing investigation, and takes an extended vacation—in Timbuktu.

On a more literary note, in
Henderson the Rain King
(1959), by Saul Bellow, the title character, Eugene, an introspective, earnest, and egocentric former violinist and pig farmer, seeks to find himself and escape his troubles with the modern world with a one-way ticket to Africa. Traveling cross-country on foot to visit native tribes, he unexpectedly becomes the Great White Sungo, the rain king of the Wariri, when he performs certain feats of prowess. In charge of both moisture and fertility, Henderson participates in a frenzied ceremony involving leaping, drumming, shrieking, chanting, and whipping both images of the gods and one another:

Having found at least part of himself, Henderson, significantly transformed by his experiences and eager to start anew, takes a flight back to America. In evocative passages that inspired Joni Mitchell's popular song “Both Sides Now,” Bellow writes, “We are the first generation to see the clouds from both sides. What a privilege! First people dreamed upward. Now they dream both upward and downward. This is bound to change something” (280). “[Clouds are] like courts of eternal heaven. Only they aren't eternal, that's the whole thing; they are seen once and never seen again, being figures and not abiding realities” (333).

At the urging of his older brother Bernard, Kurt Vonnegut moved to Schenectady, New York, in 1947, where he worked, unhappily, as a publicist for General
Electric—a company he once said “
was
science fiction”—in what he called “this goddamn nightmare job.”
²⁵
At a time when the air force's Project Cirrus was taking over the cloud-seeding business (chapter 5), Vonnegut published “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” a science fiction story in
Collier's
that emphasizes an inventor's moral resistance to an attempted militarization of his invention. His first novel,
Player Piano
(1952), was inspired by the mechanization he witnessed at GE and deals with the demoralizing effects of vast corporations attempting to use technology to automate everything and replace human labor with machines. The setting is Illium, a fictitious town along the Iroquois River in New York State, a dreary mill town dominated by a high-tech factory called Illium Works. In reality, Schenectady, on the Mohawk River, is the home of General Electric, while Illium is the ancient Roman name for Troy, which is also an industrial city near Schenectady in New York.

While still at GE, Vonnegut heard about the visit of H. G. Wells to the plant in the 1930s and how Irving Langmuir proposed a story idea to the famous novelist and futurist involving a new form of water (ice-nine) that would freeze at room temperature. Wells never wrote about this, but Vonnegut thought it might someday be worth pursuing. Bernard Vonnegut had, in reality, identified the hexagonal structure of silver iodide (ice-six?) as a substance that could trigger natural ice formation in clouds. Years later, Vonnegut used these ideas in his book
Cat's Cradle
(1963), where a quirky and amoral scientist named Felix Hoenikker, a loose composite of Langmuir and H-bomb scientists Stanislaw Ulam and Edward Teller, invents a water-like substance that instantly freezes everything it touches. When a tiny crystal of “ice-nine” is brought into contact with liquid water, it stimulates the molecules into arranging themselves into solid form.

Bernard obviously had a big influence on Kurt. Real-life meteorologist Craig Bohren credited
Cat's Cradle
with the “best discussion of nucleation” in print and claimed that the novel contained more information on this subject than “all the physics textbooks written since the beginning of time.”
²⁶
Indeed, Langmuir and Teller were reportedly fascinated by the theoretical possibility that a substance such as ice-nine could actually exist. In the book, Hoenikker's intent is to create a material that will be useful to armies bogged down in muddy battlefields, but the result is an unprecedented ecological disaster that destroys the world.

Clearly, the practice of weather control is not restricted to the West, to modern times, or to scientific practices. It has much deeper roots in world cultures and carries
much deeper meaning than simply making rain or stopping it. In
Rain Making and Other Weather Vagaries
(1926), William Jackson Humphreys (1862–1949), a meteorological physicist at the U.S. Weather Bureau, classifies rainmaking into three general categories:
magical
(practices alleging personal control over secret forces of nature),
religious
(appeals to a higher power or supernatural being), and
scientific
(using natural means to alter the otherwise undisturbed course of nature). Closely following Scottish anthropologist James George Frazer's influential work
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion
(1890), Humphreys introduces his readers to magical rainmaking practices such as bloodletting and mimicry of lightning, thunder, rain, and clouds. As did Frazer before him, Humphreys writes of ceremonies to stop the rain, involving the sympathetic magic of setting fires, heating stones, or keeping things dry. His treatment of religious rites includes appeals and supplications directed to the gods, tribal ancestors, or deceased rainmakers. In some cases, the ceremonies are intended to threaten, abuse, or annoy the powers that be. Ringing church bells in inclement weather and praying for rain were the two most common. In his writing, Humphreys tries heroically to separate myth from science and reserves “scientific rainmaking” for special treatment, but as this chapter and those to follow demonstrate, the distinction between mythological and analytical, fictional and aspirational is not so clear-cut.

Today, chemical cloud seeders have largely superseded traditional rain kings and queens, but apart from (apparently) dealing with the same topic, weather control, they hold a vastly different social status. Silver iodide flares may serve as the new fetish replacing shamanistic practices, but traditional rainmakers were and still are celebrated as central figures in their societies, while the cloud seeders are considered culturally marginal at best. If the world's cultures remain firmly rooted in myth, tradition, and storytelling, so too does the history of weather and climate control.

The hubris and folly of Phaethon, themes from Milton and Dante, and examples drawn from cultures other than our own serve to remind us of the richness and relevance of myth and storytelling. Daniel Quinn's distinction between the Takers and the Leavers, expressed through the fictional voice of Ishmael, serves further to problematize and universalize human relationships and attitudes toward the sky. Rather than standing in opposition to rationality, these stories point to fundamental relationships among nature, culture, and human solidarity that are currently not being examined in the scientistic West.

The examples of early popular sci-fi literature on weather and climate control make many of the moral points often left unsaid by scientists and engineers. Some of the stories told here are drawn from prominent authors, but most of them are probably unfamiliar. All of them, written in a variety of genres and from
different angles, are relevant to later chapters. Standard histories often privilege the heroic genre. Warriors, statesmen, scientists, and lone inventors rise to face the unknown or to meet unprecedented challenges. This is particularly true in much of the history of science—but not in this book. The FIDO fog-clearing story (chapter 4) is about as close to the heroic genre as it gets.

In the fictional accounts presented here, George Griffith's
Great Weather Syndicate
fits the heroic mold, with Arthur Arkwright ending up as a managed hero. Less ruly are the heroic socialists who oppose the Air Trust. Tragedy dominates
The Wreck of the South Pole
,
The Evacuation of England
, and the short story “The Rain-Maker.” Mark Twain's
American Claimant
is pure comedy, as is the geoengineering Western
The Eighth Wonder
. So, too, are the stories of Jeremy the rain bat in
Jingling in the Wind
and
Porky the Rain-Maker
, while N. Richard Nash's
Rainmaker
is a self-described romantic comedy. The
Sky King
episode is largely unclassifiable, but on balance it is indeed an adventure-farce.