Fixing the Sky (11 page)

The tragicomedic hybrid genre is also prevalent in this literature, from the Baltimore Gun Club's failed attempt to tip the Earth's axis for profit in Jules Verne's
The Purchase of the North Pole
to PAX and his Lavender Ray in
The Man Who Rocked the Earth
, and Kurt Vonnegut's Felix Hoenikker and the practitioners of the absurd human-centered philosophy of Bokononism in
Cat's Cradle
. Even Donald Duck, as “Master Rain Maker,” strikes out in anger and slinks away in shame to avoid blame. There are ample opportunities in this type of analysis to reward additional scholars with literary interests—if we can only break out of our narrative ruts. There are no classical heroes here. It is the tragicomic—the voices of Verne, Vonnegut, and even Donald Duck—that seems to come closest to the actual tone of most of the checkered history of weather and climate control.

RAIN MAKERS

—ROBERT DECOURCY WARD, “ARTIFICIAL RAIN”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE
quest to control nature, including the sky, is deeply rooted in the history of Western science. In the dedication to
The Great Instauration
(1620), Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) encouraged his “wisest and most learned” patron, James I, to regenerate and restore the sciences. Bacon's program involved “collecting and perfecting” natural and experimental histories to ground philosophy and the sciences “on the solid foundation of experience of every kind.”
¹
His wide-ranging catalog of particular histories included aerial and oceanic topics that are relevant here: lightning, wind, clouds, showers, snow, fog, floods, heat, drought, ebb and flow of the sea. The goal was to replace Aristotelian natural philosophy, stimulate rapid progress in science, improve the human condition through technology, and eventually control nature.

Bacon's philosophy identified three fundamental states of nature: (1) the liberty of nature, (2) the bonds of nature, and (3) things artificial. In the first category, nature is, well, “natural”—free and unconstrained. The second category comprises mistakes and monstrosities resulting from motions that are violently forced or impeded. The third category involves art and technology—mechanisms
and experiments constraining nature to operate under human control. Thus gentle rains falling from the sky may water a garden naturally; rainmaking, which seeks to bond and bend natural processes, is a violent or forced act, a monstrosity; and designed irrigation systems, employed by many agriculturalists, constitute artifice. To cite another example of the three states, a shade tree and a gentle breeze may provide some respite on a hot day; towing icebergs to lower latitudes or turning the blue sky milky white with sulfate aerosols to attenuate sunbeams, however, would be violent acts involving forced motions and would constitute errors of potentially monstrous proportions; and the design of building ventilation and cooling systems, subject to individual choice, is clearly within the realm of artifice. As a third example, the eruption of a volcano is considered a force of nature; making an artificial volcano or otherwise tinkering with an existing one would certainly be a mistake; but deflecting lava flows around a village is an artificial but useful thing to do.

In
New Atlantis
(1624), the scientists of Solomon's House practice both observation and manipulation of the weather: “We have high towers ... for the view of divers meteors—as winds, rain, snow, hail, and some of the fiery meteors also. And upon them in some places are dwellings of hermits, whom we visit sometimes and instruct what to observe ... and engines for multiplying and enforcing of winds to set also on divers motions.”
²
In great experimental spaces, researchers imitate and demonstrate natural meteors such as snow, hail, rain, thunder, and lightning and “some artificial rains of bodies and not of water” (400). Three so-called mystery men are in charge of expanding the repertoire of practices not yet brought into the arts, and three pioneers or miners try new experiments “such as themselves think good” (410); that is, they manipulate nature without further review or oversight, a task requiring perfect virtue and judgment by the experimentalists.

Bacon was conversant with a venerable humanistic tradition that divided history into three parts—ancient, medieval, and modern—but his valuation of the three eras was asymmetric. He granted grudging respect to the ancients, denigrated the Middle Ages, and elevated modern accomplishments to equal or soon-to-be-greater status than those of antiquity. For Bacon, the rise of modern science was due to “the true method of experience ... commencing ... with experience duly ordered and digested, not bungling or erratic, and from it educing axioms, and from established axioms, again new experiments.”
³
“New discoveries,” Bacon argued, “must be sought from the light of nature, not fetched back out of the darkness of antiquity” (154). He elaborated at length on his new method, calling for researchers to work together and making the important point that the sciences were about to enter a period of great fertility. Bacon's
communitarian campaign was taken over by innumerable practitioners in the seventeenth century. His greatest legacy, without doubt, was institutional, in that his outlook was absorbed by the Royal Society of London and by many other scientific societies.

The “scientific revolution,” although subject to intense historiographic debate, is a term that commonly refers to the transformation of thought about nature through which the authority of ancient texts was replaced by the “mechanical philosophy” and methodology of modern science. Most, but not all, historians see it as a series of events in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or, more narrowly, from 1543 (
De Revolutionibus
of Copernicus) to 1687 (
Principia
of Newton). The standard accounts privilege astronomy, physics, and medicine, but also in this era natural philosophers turned away from the traditional practice of preparing commentaries on Aristotle's
Meteorologica
and instead began focusing on new techniques for describing, measuring, and weighing the atmosphere. Behind this turn was the hope that somehow quantification might lead to understanding and trigger a cascade of new capabilities, including prediction and control. Beginning with the Accademia del Cimento in Florence, the scientific societies of Europe attempted to make histories of the weather and promoted the collection, compilation, dissemination, and discussion of meteorological observations from remote locations and over widespread areas of the globe. Adherents of the new mechanical and chemical philosophy insisted that all atmospheric phenomena could be reduced to their component processes and could be explained by an emerging body of natural laws. They developed new instruments—thermometers, barometers, hygrometers, and calibrated rain gauges—for observing and quantifying aspects of the atmosphere. New practices and perspectives meant that henceforth no atmospheric process, however seemingly insignificant, would be left unrecorded. As a result, a culture of measurement emerged, linked to a new meteorological science of planetary proportions. This “descent, with variation,” of viable meteorological instruments, so proudly traced by scientists and historians, is only one aspect of the story, since many techniques resulted in dead ends—in extinct or forgotten practices. The lack of uniform standards and global and temporal coverage, however, remained a continuing challenge.
⁴

In 1949 one of the early champions of the idea of a scientific revolution, the historian Herbert Butterfield, wrote the following:

More recently, a prominent feminist scholar, Carolyn Merchant, saw the same events as a disaster of unmitigated proportions: “The removal of animistic, organic assumptions about the cosmos constituted the death of nature—the most far-reaching effect of the Scientific Revolution.”
⁶
She argured that because scientists had redefined nature as a system of dead, inert particles moved by external rather than inherent forces, their endorsement of the reductionistic framework of the mechanical philosophy legitimized nature's manipulation and progressive destruction. Power over nature was fully compatible with the values of scientists' ultimate supporters—governments—especially the military establishment, commodifiers, and other ideologues and opportunists of various stripes. Others wonder if there have been many scientific revolutions, or perhaps none at all!
⁷

Most historians agree that since the seventeenth century, scientists have attempted to complete the Baconian program, elevating the attainment of natural knowledge to the sine qua non of human achievement, and then wielding this knowledge to gain power over and control of nature for the stated purpose of improving the human condition, however narrowly defined, but often falling short of this goal. This program, the opening wedge of a revolution articulated in different ways by Galileo, Descartes, and others, was more than a new set of techniques in the laboratory or the field. It was a revolution in thought that placed humanity at the conceptual and willful center of the universe, redefined our relationship with the natural world, elevated the scientific method to the pinnacle of truth recently vacated by the church fathers, and dealt a blow to apocalyptic thinking. As the Enlightenment eroded belief in divine providence as a moving force in history, the historiographic void was filled by the notion of progress, a secular notion based on the development and application of human reason to the challenges of understanding, prediction, and ultimately, control.

In the closing decades of the eighteenth century in Europe, and slightly later in Russia and the United States, serious attempts were made to broaden the geographic coverage of weather observations, standardize their collection, and publish the results. Individual observers in particular locales dutifully tended to their journals while networks of cooperative observers gradually extended the meteorological frontiers. No one, however, had yet proposed a serious scientificbased program of weather control. James Pollard Espy (1785–1860) was a leading meteorologist of his day, the first to be employed by the U.S. government in this capacity. Born into a farm family in Washington County, Pennsylvania, and educated at Transylvania University in Kentucky, he worked as a frontier schoolmaster and lawyer until he moved to Philadelphia in 1817. There he supported himself by teaching mathematics and classics part time at the Franklin Institute while devoting his free time to meteorological research. From 1834 to 1838, he served as the chairman of the Joint Committee on Meteorology of the Franklin Institute and the American Philosophical Society. He won the latter's Magellenic Prize in 1836 for his theory of hail. Working with the scientific societies of Philadelphia, Espy gained the support of Pennsylvania's legislature to equip weather observers in each county in the state with barometers, thermometers, and other standard instruments to provide a larger, synoptic view of the weather, especially the passage of storms. He also maintained a national network of correspondents and volunteer observers. During this period, he invented a “nephelescope,” an early cloud chamber, which he used in his popular lectures and, in his technical work, to calculate the amount of heat released by condensing water vapor.

Espy moved to Washington, D.C., in 1842. In his first government appointment, as professor of mathematics in the navy, he developed a ventilator for ships and expanded his network of meteorological correspondents. He also held a joint appointment as the “national meteorologist” in the U.S. Army Medical Department, a position that boosted his storm studies by providing him access to the meteorological reports of the army post surgeons. From 1847 to 1857, his salary was provided by annual appropriations from Congress. With Joseph Henry, he established the Smithsonian meteorological system of observers and experimented with telegraphic weather reports. Several of his major reports on meteorology appeared as U.S. Senate executive documents.
⁸