Fixing the Sky (15 page)

2.1 Weather engineers and onlookers in El Paso, Texas, watching the inflation of the balloon in which John T. Ellis is to make his ascent. (
HARPER'S WEEKLY
, OCTOBER 10, 1891, 772)

From there, the team proceeded by invitation to Corpus Christi and San Diego, Texas, which were reportedly “suffering a severe drought”; according to Ellis, when the group arrived and before they could set up their equipment, “a heavy rain had set in from off the Gulf of Mexico and the weather continued stormy for several days.” Still, they decided to bombard the rain-swept skies. Although many shells were detonated with no apparent effect, Ellis reported, selectively, that one explosion, in heavier clouds than usual, “was immediately followed by a downpour which lasted for several minutes and soaked the [observing] party to the skin before they could enter a carriage” (33).

According to long-term climatological records, West Texas was well watered in 1891, with rainfall up to an inch more than average. Or could it be that the amount was enhanced and the statistics skewed by the Dyrenforth team's purported successes? Lieutenant S. Allen Dyer, second in command of the expedition, concluded from his experiences that “rain can be produced by artificial means ... and ‘rainmaking' will prove a practicable and most valuable success when the conditions are favorable for rain” (41). Eugene Fairchild, an expedition member, testified: “I am convinced that the experiments have been entirely successful, and furthermore that the scheme is practicable” (53). But how practical is it to have more than twenty artillerists staying in a town at a cost of more than $1,500 just for materials? Nevertheless, some prominent citizens of San Diego said they were “astonished” at the results and were sure that the rain was a direct result of the experiment. Judge James O. Luby sent Dyrenforth his congratulations: “What was my surprise, after retiring for the night, to hear the patter [of rain] on the shingles; I then knew that, in the language of the festive cowboy, you had ‘got a cinch on Old Pluvius,' and that the ‘Powers' that be, go there with the limpid
aqua pura
” (55).

Nevertheless, Dyrenforth, who had spent $17,000 for the three experiments ($9,000 from the government and $8,000 from local sources and assistance in kind), sounded a note of uncertainty in his official report: “The few experiments which have been made, do not furnish sufficient data from which to form definite conclusions, or evidence upon which to uphold or condemn the theories of the artificial production or increase of rainfall by concussion” (57). Still, he ventured the following three positive “inferences”:

To paraphrase all this, if you go to a dry area during a typically rainy season and conduct entertaining and impressive demonstrations but do not take any careful
measurements, you can usually convince the eyewitnesses of your efficacy and, in turn, claim credit for any rain that does fall nearby.

The media had a field day with Dyrenforth's experiments. The
Nation
criticized the government for wasting tax dollars, observing that the effect of the explosion of a 10-foot hydrogen balloon on aerial currents would be less than “the effect of the jump of one vigorous flea upon a thousand-ton steamship running at a speed of twenty knots.”
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Scientific American
pointed out that after the rainmakers had telegraphed from Texas to all parts of the country announcing the wonderful success of their bombs, it was discovered that the meteorological records for that locality had indicated probabilities for rain for a day or two in advance of the firing, and that the rain would have fallen all the same without any burning of powder or sending up of balloons. The article was accompanied by an illustration of traditional rainmaking in India and the cutting remark that there “seems to be little doubt that the swinging of a Hindoo head downward is just as effective for producing rain as the making of loud noises.”
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The
Farm Implement News
published a satirical cartoon of Dyrenforth and his team in action (figure 2.2).

F. W. Clarke's humorous “An Ode to Pluviculture; or, The Rhyme of the Rain Machine,” published in
Life
in 1891, was undoubtedly inspired by Dyrenforth's experiments. In the poem, the hapless farmer, Jeremy Jonathan Joseph Jones, seeks to break a drought using

His third shot into a cloudless sky “brought a heavy dew”; his fourth, tornadoes, “thunder, rain and hail.” Jeremy drowned in the ensuing flood, and his farm is now a lake. All efforts to stop the deluge were in vain,

Curtis, the meteorologist on the Dyrenforth expedition, ended his official report on a sour note: “These experiments have not afforded any scientific standing to the theory that rain-storms can be produced by concussions.”
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He thought
it had only encouraged the “charlatans and sharpers” who were busily engaged in defrauding the farmers of the semiarid states by contracting to produce rain and by selling rights to use their various methods. But Senator Farwell, who had supported the experiments, was very upbeat in an interview with the
New York World
: “For twenty years I have had no doubt rain could be produced in that way, and quite expected the experiments to be successful.... When Prof. Dyrenforth makes his official report of these experiments, I expect that [the government will appropriate] $1 million, may be, or $500 thousand any way, for rainmaking.”
⁴⁵
Dyrenforth ultimately claimed victory and was actually reappointed as government rainmaker in 1892 to continue the work in San Antonio, Texas, with a grant of $10,000, although he spent less than half of that. He distanced himself from all the press coverage and hoopla, but claimed in his official report that his
practical skills, combined with his use of special explosives “to keep the weather in an unsettled condition,” could cause or at least enhance precipitation—when conditions were favorable! Not everyone was convinced, however.
⁴⁶

2.2 Robert St. George Dyrenforth claimed success after his federally funded rainmaking mission to Texas in 1891. After receiving a telegram from the weather bureau saying “Rainstorm approaching,” Dyrenforth orders his assistants to speed up: “Hurry up the inflation, touch off the bombs, send up the kites, let go the rackarock; here's a telegram announcing a storm. If we don't hurry, it will be on us before we raise our racket.” (CARTOON BY H. MAYER, IN
FARM IMPLEMENT NEWS
, SEPTEMBER 1891, 25)

In 1891 Lucien I. Blake, professor of physics and electrical engineering at Kansas State Agricultural College, reviewed the Dyrenforth experiments and criticized the working assumption that concussion alone could make it rain. Blake noted that the effect of “air quakes” (basically energy from sound waves) should be immediate, yet Dyrenforth reported rain hours or days after the explosions. Perhaps, argued Blake, the smoke and particles from the explosions had a greater effect than the concussions. He pointed out that scientists had recently discovered that moisture does not condense in dust-free air but only in the presence of dust nuclei, or “Aitken nuclei.” Blake further observed that every hailstone had a bit of dust in it and pointed to his own experimental seeding results with powders of carbon, silica, sulfur, and common salt that precipitated the moisture in a condensation chamber, and on burning sulfur and gunpowder to produce heavy, visible clouds of vapor.
⁴⁷

A year later, Blake proposed a field test to produce rain in the free atmosphere by raising, at intervals of about half a mile, a number of relatively inexpensive tethered balloons, each lifting a 30-pound smoldering ball of turpentine mixed with sawdust, straw, or paper pulp. These would generate a considerable smoke screen and might produce the right type of nuclei in the proper (but not excessive) concentrations needed for rain. Although he had insufficient funds for the field test, he claimed that his reasoning was based on sound laboratory experiments and would be much cheaper than Dyrenforth's elaborate explosive techniques.
⁴⁸

Observers from afar also commented on the explosive American rainmaking attempts. In
Transactions of the Epidemiological Society of London
for 1892, Sir William Moore noted that a rainmaker in New York had exploded 200 pounds of dynamite carried aloft by a balloon over the Croton Aqueduct and was immediately rewarded with a heavy downpour. He thought it “quite possible” to produce rain, since in his understanding clouds were “masses of minute vesicles” in an aeriform state. Their liquefaction could be caused by an explosion and the resulting compression that forces the moisture to coalesce, become larger drops, and fall as rain. Contrary to Powers, Ruggles, and Dyrenforth, all of whom maintained that concussive explosions could intervene directly in copious streams of invisible high-altitude moisture, Moore held that the amount of rain produced artificially would be insufficient unless clouds were already present, an unlikely situation during droughts in tropical lands. Instead, he recommended that governments invest in irrigation systems.
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One of the more colorful ideas for bringing down the rain at the time came from G. H. Bell of New York in 1880. He proposed building a series of hollow towers 1,500 feet high—one set of towers to blow saturated air up to cooler air and have the moisture condensed into rain, the other set to suck in rain clouds and store them for use as needed. The inventor considered that the same system could be used to prevent rain by reversing the blower so that the descending air might “annihilate” the clouds.
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Other explosive ideas were in the air as well. A weather patent to destroy or disrupt tornadoes was filed by J. B. Atwater in 1887. His device consisted of dynamite charges with blasting caps installed on poles and situated a mile or so southwest of a settlement. A tornado crossing the elevated minefield was supposed to detonate the explosives with its high winds and flying debris, hopefully disrupting its circulation and protecting the town. With the likelihood of a given area being visited by tornadoes rare and their recurrence even more rare, the installation of minefields, even elevated ones, never caught on—fortunately so for the generation of children then playing in the fields.
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The most improbable invention, however, belongs to Laurice Leroy Brown of Patmos, Kansas, who filed a patent application in 1892 for an “automatic transporter and exploder for explosives aiding rain-fall” (figure 2.3). The device was basically a large tower (
A
) with a sloping wire (
B
) connected to a battery (
C
) on which an operator can hang a stick of dynamite (
D
) on a pulley (
E
) and have it roll along a track until it completes an electrical circuit through a wire (
F
) and point (
G
) at the end of the track (
H
). The completed electric circuit was intended to ignite the dynamite and set off shock waves to stimulate rainfall, according to the ideas published by Edward Powers. Although erecting, and especially operating, such a device would certainly be a welcome diversion on the Kansas plains, possible design flaws include the danger to the operator of climbing a high metal tower with sticks of dynamite during an electrical storm and the apparent certainty that the first detonation of explosives at the end of the track would completely destroy the apparatus at the base of the sloping wire.
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