Fixing the Sky (13 page)

Espy received honorable mention in 1843 in Nathaniel Hawthorne's “Hall of Fantasy”—a marketplace of wild ideas that most of us visit at least once but some dreamers occupy permanently; a marketplace seemingly perfectly suited to the millennial ideas of rain kings and climate engineers. Here the statues of the rulers and demigods of imagination—Homer, Dante, Milton, Goethe—are memorialized in stone, while those of more limited and ephemeral fame are made of wood. Plato's Idea looms over all. Here are social reformers, abolitionists, and Second Adventist “Father [William] Miller himself!” Civil and social engineers propound ideas of “cities to be built, as if by magic, in the heart of pathless forests; and of streets to be laid out, where now the sea was tossing; and of mighty rivers to be stayed in their courses, in order to turn the machinery of a cotton-mill.”
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“Upon my word,” exclaimed Hawthorne, “it is dangerous to listen to such dreamers as these! Their madness is contagious” (204). Here are inventors of fantastic machines aimed to “reduce day dreams to practice”: models of a railroad through the air, a tunnel under the sea, distilling machines for capturing heat from moonshine and for condensing morning mist into square blocks of granite, and a lens for making sunshine out of a lady's smile. “Professor Espy was here,” reminiscent of Aeolus, the god of the winds, “with a tremendous storm in a gum-elastic bag” (206). The “inmates of the hall,” it is said (remember that all pass through here on occasion), take up permanent residence by throwing themselves into “the current of a theory,” oblivious to the “landmarks of fact” passing along the stream's bank.

Charles Le Maout (1805–1887), a pharmacist and mine assayer in Saint-Brieuc, near the coast of Brittany, was a dedicated pacifist. One of his powerful arguments in favor of peace went far beyond typical arguments invoking the carnage, desolation, and miseries of war. He thought that war, especially cannonading but also the ringing of bells, destroyed the fragile equilibrium of the aerial elements and was responsible for undesirable atmospheric perturbations of all kinds, including rain, hail, thunder, lightning, harsh winters, and possibly airborne epidemic diseases. He wrote:

During the memorable siege of Sevastopol (1854–1855), which he observed, Le Maout said “all of nature was affected” by the cannonading, which he claimed caused a widespread outbreak of whooping cough. He convinced Marshal Jean-Baptiste Philibert Vaillant, the scientifically minded French minister of war who had instituted telegraphic weather reports, to order his artillery officers to record the weather on days when cannon were being fired. The results were inconclusive, and Vaillant, unimpressed by the outcome, disavowed the theory in the
Journal officiel de l'Empire
, concluding, “The famous influence of cannon is illusory.”
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Disappointed but undaunted, Le Maout collected his own statistics to show that the weather in years with peace was more salubrious than in those with war. He advised keeping both the guns and the church bells of Europe and the Mediterranean silent, both in war and during celebrations, since their concussions disrupted the natural course of the winds and produced clouds and condensation at immense distances:

Conversely, he argued that selective cannonading and bell ringing during times of drought might provide relief for agriculture. Le Maout was convinced that he had presented the most powerful argument for the establishment of universal peace and urged his readers to propagate and popularize this doctrine for the sake of humanity. Waxing poetic, he wrote:

In America, the enthusiasm for “har vesting the storm” with gunpowder and other explosives was just beginning. During the Civil War, some observers began to suspect that the smoke and concussion of artillery fire generated rain. After all, didn't it tend to rain a day, or two ... or three ... following most battles? The heavy fighting at Gettysburg on the first three days of July 1863 under fair skies was followed by torrential downpours on July 4 that lasted all day and into the night, resulting in roads knee-deep in mud and water that hampered the Confederate retreat. Skeptics hastened to point out that the connection between war and the weather was an ancient one—and a shaky one.

In Plutarch's “Caius Marius” (75 C.E.), “it is observed, indeed, that extraordinary rains generally fall after great battles; whether it be, that some deity chooses to wash and purify the earth with water from above, or whether the blood and corruption, by the moist and heavy vapors they emit, thicken the air, which is likely to be altered by the smallest cause.”
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According to William Jackson Humphreys, Plutarch's first option was a matter of belief, not science, while his second option was not significant, since only about 0.01 inch of rain would fall over a square mile if ten thousand soldiers, assuming they were nothing but blood and sweat, “were wholly evaporated and then all condensed back.”
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Humphreys posed a plausible explanation for the apparently high correlation between rains and battles. He noted that plans were usually made and battles fought in good weather, so that after the battle in the temperate regions of Europe or North America rain will often occur in accordance with the natural three- to five-day periodicity for such events. Perhaps generals simply preferred to fight under fair skies, with rainy days therefore tending naturally to follow. Perhaps it would tend to rain several days after doing most anything!

In 1871 Chicago civil engineer and retired Civil War general Edward Powers published his book
War and the Weather, or, The Artificial Production of Rain
, in which he reviewed the weather following selected battles and contended that rain followed artillery engagements—usually within several days. Powers found a “perfect explanation” for this in the theory of oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury, who maintained that there were two great atmospheric currents, the equatorial and the polar, flowing aloft in nearly opposite directions. Powers argued that the concussion of battle caused these higher strata to mix and release their moisture. He envisioned stimulating rainfall on demand through the agency of loud noises, perhaps by detonating explosive charges carried aloft by kites or balloons. In times of drought, when the ground was bone-dry, he envisioned tapping into the elevated rivers of air that carried abundant moisture
from the Pacific Ocean. Analogous to drilling for groundwater, aerial explosions would merely release the moisture that was already up there, traveling overhead. Seven decades later, this “river of air” would be called the jet stream and would be deemed important not for its moisture, since it is absolutely desiccated, but for its dynamic effects on high-flying aircraft and on surface weather.

When critics pointed out that loud concussions, if effective, should cause it to rain immediately, not hours or days later, Powers fell back on his two-current theory: “The center of the atmospheric disturbance caused by a battle should remain in the vicinity of the battlefield while the two currents are mixing together and initiating the process that leads to rain—a process which, it is plain, must require time in reaching a state of effective action.”
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However deficient in meteorological details, Powers's theory was appealing to desperate farmers, like those in New England at the time, since it directed their hopeful gaze aloft, away from their parched fields and devastated crops. Powers reminded them that there is an ocean of moisture derived not from surface evaporation but from the Pacific Ocean and just waiting to be tapped. However, one observer noted that no effect on the weather had been perceived in the Rocky Mountains after years of blasting for mining and road-building operations.
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Powers sought support for his theory from the U.S. Army Signal Office weather service and through his representative, Charles Farwell (R-Illinois), who championed this cause for the next two decades. After reviewing Powers's theory and his proposal to fire three hundred cannon arranged in a circle a mile across, the House Committee on Agriculture concluded in a report that the government should act unilaterally on this issue of great significance and support Powers's field experiments: “We have the powder, and we have the guns, and the men to serve them, and we ought not to leave to other nations and to after-ages the task of solving the great question as to whether the control of the weather is not, to a useful extent, within the reach of man.”
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In another proposal, Powers suggested employing the siege guns at the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois for rainmaking experiments at a cost, per rainstorm, of $21,000, an amount he claimed was much less expensive than the cost of irrigation or the loss of crops due to lack of rain, but an amount that could outfit more than a score of family farms. The proposals were not funded.

Powers finally found an ally in Daniel Ruggles of Fredericksburg, Virginia. Ruggles was a West Point graduate, a former general in the Confederate Army, and the owner of a ranch in Rio Bravo, Texas, who received a patent in 1880 “for producing rain fall ... by conveying and exploding torpedoes or other explosive agents within the cloud realm.”
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Ruggles's “invention” consisted, in brief, of a balloon carrying torpedoes and cartridges charged with such explosives as nitroglycerine,
dynamite, gun cotton, gunpowder, or fulminates, and connecting the balloon with an electrical apparatus for exploding the ordnance.

Like his predecessor Espy, Ruggles made surprising claims to have “invented a method for condensing clouds in the atmospheric realm, and for precipitating rainfall from rain-clouds, to prevent drought, to stimulate and sustain vegetation, to equalize rainfall and waterflow, and by combining the available scientific inventions of the age, to guard against pestilence and famine, and to prevent, or to alleviate them where prevailing.”
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He claimed that the concussions and vibrations of the explosions would, under the proper conditions, consolidate the “diffused mists” passing overhead into rainfalls. His scheme favored the remote detonation of the explosives using timed fuses or electric wires, but for more precision (and much greater risk) he also imagined aeronauts bombing the clouds with torpedoes attached to parachutes. Promising scientific rigor (still a challenge today in rainmaking), he proposed to select clouds on which to experiment in conformity with “well-defined meteorological data,” which he listed as “barometric tension, thermometer and its changes, hygrometer, anemometer, anemoscope ..., elevation, average rainfall, river stages, and magneto-electric condition of the atmosphere” (10).

Arguing that if God had not wanted us to manipulate the clouds, he would not have placed them so clearly in our line of vision, Ruggles promised “to
appropriate the atmospheric laws of cloud-land
, in sunshine and in storm, and direct them, so far as may be practicable, within the sphere of the great industrial interests and energies of man” (12). Dazzled by his own genius, the scope of the undertaking, and the prospects for “untold advancement,” he exclaimed, “The field is broad—very broad; as deep as it is broad—it is very deep!” (12).

Ruggles claimed (as did every generation afterward) that he was taking the next step technologically, in this case by ascending above the Earth's surface into the atmospheric realms with balloon probes and human aeronauts using the latest chemical explosives and electrical devices, all under the banner of advanced engineering and meteorological science unknown to Espy:

Wrapping up his argument, which was by now a secular sermon, with themes borrowed from the march of progress and the pulpit, Ruggles claimed that his technique might alleviate human suffering both in the United States and around the world: