Fixing the Sky (22 page)

During the 2008 Summer Olympics, China spent more money on rainmaking and rain suppression than any other nation—but with no verifiable results. The country has developed a cadre of peasant artillerists, supported by a high-tech weather central, who stand ready to bombard every passing cloud with chemical agents assumed to either dry it out or make it precipitate. Note the use of cannon. In every era, weather and climate controllers employ the latest
techniques: explosives, proprietary chemicals, electrical and magnetic devices. Aviation was added in the early twentieth century, as were radar and rocketry by mid-century. Since then, every new technology of any meteorological relevance has been proposed or actually tried in the controversial quest for weather control.
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With so much invested and so little to show for it, perhaps there are more charlatans out there than we might imagine.

FOGGY THINKING

—ALEXANDER MCADIE, “THE CONTROL OF FOG”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FOR
most of human history,at least until 1944, people were at a loss to know what to do about the fogs and vapors obscuring their view. Natural fog, seen from afar, is quite beautiful as it pools in the river valleys or burns off on a sunny morning, but those enshrouded by it may not fully welcome the whiteout conditions it brings. Of course, such obscuration can be a good thing, as in Virgil's
Aeneid
when Venus cloaks her son and his companion in a thick fog to protect them on their journey, or when, following a massive artillery barrage in World War I, the fog, “mute but masterful ... countermanded all battle orders, and the roar of a thousand batteries gave way to stillness.”
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Sometimes fog is used as a theatrical curtain. Shakespeare employs the weather to reveal Hamlet's mental state when he apprehends the sky filled with “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.” Coleridge's ill-fated albatross first appears to the Ancient Mariner out of an ice fog. Then there is London or pea soup fog, mixed with the smoke of millions of chimneys, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's “duncoloured veil,” sometimes yellow, sometimes brown, composed of an unhealthy mixture of smoke and vapor.
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Actual, as opposed to literary, fogs were deemed
unhealthy and undesirable, capable of interrupting or suspending normal activities such as shipping or aviation.

In 1899 Cleveland Abbe described a local fog dispeller suitable for use on ships to assist navigation, or perhaps to increase precipitation. It was called the Tugrin fog dispeller. In foggy weather, a pipe 3 inches in diameter with a musket-shaped flange at the end was used by the navigating officer to direct a powerful stream of warm air from the engines to “blow a hole right through the fog,” causing it to fall as raindrops and providing forward visibility of several hundred feet, sufficient to avoid a collision.
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Abbe further suggested that if the pipe was aimed vertically, it could be used to condense and precipitate fog moisture—for example, for agricultural uses along the California coast. According to meteorologist Alexander McAdie, in March 1929 a murky smokefog, the densest and most persistent in twenty years, settled down over New York City, forcing transatlantic liners to lie at anchor. Commerce was suspended and commuters were stranded for several days. With the rise of commercial and military aviation, efforts to dispel fog were driven largely by the desires (and actual needs) of pilots to overcome the vulnerabilities and limitations that fog imposed. In the second quarter of the twentieth century, electrical, chemical, and physical methods of fog dissipation included the electrified sand trials of L. Francis Warren and his associates, the experiments with chemical sprays of Henry G. Houghton, and the operational FIDO fog burners of World War II. All these projects were relevant to aviation safety, and all were of interest to the military.

From the time of Benjamin Franklin, the role of atmospheric electricity in meteorological processes, including its suspected role in stimulating precipitation and its possible role in clearing fogs, was under active investigation. In the early nineteenth century, chorographer John Williams proposed a scheme to dehumidify the British climate by electrifying it. For personal, political, and vaguely scientific reasons, he argued that climatic change in England became noticeable around 1770, with the spring and summer months becoming cloudier, wetter, and colder and the winters milder. Williams attributed this shift to human “change effected on the surface of our Island,” due to the cutting of forests, digging of canals, and enclosing of lands—all of which had combined to increase the amount of moisture released into the atmosphere and caused adverse effects on human health and agriculture. These physical changes, he
claimed, were themselves due to political and economic changes, including the American Revolution, the inflated price of grain, and heavy taxation on labor and agriculture. It was a view that sprang from the author's personal malaise and a generally unsettled mood in Britain. Williams argued that the newly “ungenial seasons” might be ameliorated by building electrical mills, two per county, with giant rotating cylinders to diffuse excess electrical fluid into the surrounding air. He imagined that the newly electrified air would then act to dissolve fogs and dissipate rain clouds. The electrical mills were never built, and the British, as ever, are still damning their damp and cloudy climate and discussing their “peculiar weather,” with no ready answers as to what, if anything, is wrong with it or how, if at all possible, to fix it.
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In the 1830s, the American chemist Robert Hare, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, promoted an electrical theory of storms. He imagined that the atmosphere behaved like a charged Leyden jar with two electrical oceans of opposite charge: the celestial and the terrestrial. Clouds acted as the mediators between the two, suspended like pith balls in a static electrical field. When the electrical balance was disturbed, the atmosphere behaved in a way that counteracted gravity. The net result was a local diminution of pressure, inducing inward- and upward-rushing currents of air that resulted in rain, hail, thunder, lightning, and, in extreme cases, tornadoes. Hare argued strenuously that he had discovered a new electrical “discharge by convection” in the atmosphere, which formed the motive power of storms and was to be considered the complement of the famous electrical discharge by conduction discovered by Franklin in lightning strokes.
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In 1884 British physicist Oliver Lodge demonstrated that smoke and dust can be precipitated by the discharge of a static electric machine. He then asked, “Why should not natural precipitation be assisted artificially?”
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In his largest-scale experiment, he cleared a smoke-filled room and discovered that electrical charges encourage the coalescence of infinitesimally small cloud droplets into “Scotch mist or fine rain.” He opined that clearing London fogs and abating industrial or urban smoke might be a “difficult but perhaps not impossible task,” equivalent to such other noble quests as navigating the Arctic Ocean, exploring the Antarctic continent, scaling Mount Everest, and conquering tropical diseases. Lodge regarded the future prospects with hope and felt that the control of the atmosphere “will be tackled either now or by posterity” (34). But applying this technique outdoors was another matter, and he admitted the propensity of physicists “to rush in where meteorologists fear to tread!” Thus the stage was set for the cloud modifiers to add electricity to their tool kit as they attempted to make rain and dissipate fogs.

On the basis of Lodge's theory, a U.S. patent was awarded in 1918 to John Graeme Balsillie of Melbourne, Australia, for a “process and apparatus for causing precipitation by coalescence of aqueous particles contained in the atmosphere.”
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Balsillie claimed to be able to ionize a volume of air and switch the polarity of the electrical charges in the clouds “by means of suitable ray emanations,” making them more attractive to one another and thus producing artificial rain. His apparatus, complete with a schematic diagram, consisted of an array of tethered balloons or kites linked to an electrical power supply on the ground. His patent claimed that Röntgen rays from a tube carried aloft and beamed to reflect off a metalliccoated balloon would ionize the surrounding air. In an age in which mysterious X-rays could penetrate flesh to reveal bone, the development of a rainmaking ray gun might be just around the corner. Balsillie's balloons were charged to 320,000 volts—or at least he said they should be—and the ionization, he claimed, would extend outward for a good 200 to 300 feet from each balloon or kite—to be flown in formation (more or less) during a brewing storm. There is no evidence, however, that this patent was anything more than the inventor's flight of fancy—except for its influence on L. Francis Warren and his associates.

“Fliers Bring Rain with Electric Sand,” the
New York Times
headline announced on February 12, 1923. The story itself, however, was quite underwhelming. Between 1921 and 1923, field trials conducted in Dayton, Ohio, at McCook Field seemed to show that electrified sand could dissipate clouds and might someday both dispel fog and generate artificial rain. The demonstrations were the brainchild of Luke Francis Warren (fl. 1930), a self-styled and self-taught independent inventor and dreamer who frequently misstated his credentials as “Dr. Warren of Harvard University.” Credibility and financial support came from Wilder D. Bancroft (1867–1953), a well-ensconced but controversial chemistry professor at Cornell University. Technical assistance came from Emory Leon Chaffee (1885–1975), a Harvard University electrophysicist, and the U.S. Army Air Service provided aircraft facilities (and a patina of respectability). Although the hope of making rain and driving mists from cities, harbors, and flying fields was great, the hype was even greater. Little is known about Warren, save for a few press clippings, but his story can be told through documents in the Bancroft Papers at Cornell.

Wilder Bancroft, grandson of the famous historian and statesman George Bancroft, was expected to do great things. He studied physical chemistry with Wilhelm Ostwald in Leipzig and J. H. van't Hoff in Amsterdam before joining the faculty of Cornell University in 1895. Bancroft was seemingly more adept at writing than at chemistry. He attracted students with his genteel style and wit more than with his laboratory technique, while he dedicated his considerable writing skills to the new
Journal of Physical Chemistry
, which he edited for thirtyseven years. During the Great War, Bancroft served in the Chemical Warfare Service and wrote its history; after the war, he chaired the Division of Chemistry of the National Research Council. Back at Cornell, Bancroft worked on colloid chemistry, the chemical physics of finely divided matter in suspension—for example, in such complex fluids as ink, wine, milk, smoke, and fog. Thinking about fog, specifically fog dissipation, brought Bancroft into the controversial field of weather control. If, in laboratory tests, electric fields precipitated smoke and fog, why would they not do so in nature?

At the time, Bancroft was under fire from critics for his lack of clarity in organic chemistry and for having missed most of the new physical implications of quantum mechanics. He was busy trying to keep his struggling journal afloat, more by diplomacy and fund-raising than by the influx of new ideas. The marketing of ideas was important to Bancroft. He once opined, “Since the greatest discoveries are likely to be ones for which the world is least ready ... the greatest scientific men should really be super-salesmen.” On weather control, however, he chose to stand on the sidelines as an investor and cheerleader and allowed his associate Warren to take the point position as advocate and business “rainmaker,” if not super-salesman. As the airplane was opening up a new era in weather control, Bancroft wrote to Warren in 1920, “[i]t would probably be absolutely prohibitive in cost to produce rain by spraying clouds from beneath; but it is quite possible that you can get satisfactory results by spraying from above.”
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To get his ideas off the ground, Warren lobbied in Washington, D.C., lunching and dining on Bancroft's dime, with “leading men of the air force.” Initially, the military offered merely to take electrical measurements at its flying fields. General Electric was interested in providing the electrical equipment. Major William Blair, who had led the meteorological efforts of the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the war, offered the use of an airplane. The lobbying possibilities were endless. Warren wrote to Bancroft that he had to move quickly, or “I shall be forced to go through the entertainment and visit stunts with a ‘new bunch of guys', but as I like them all, and have a soft spot in my make-up for all mankind, I do not apprehend serious trouble, but only inconvenience, as there will be days here when I can do little more than spend denario [mainly Bancroft's] and kick
up my heels away from home.” Detained in Washington over a weekend, Warren ended his letter to Bancroft with a list of his possible activities, including “attending the aviators ball at Langley Field, playing in the parks with the kids on Sunday, or flirting with the hat girls at the restaurants.”
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