Fixing the Sky (17 page)

For centuries, farmers in Austria shot consecrated guns at storms in attempts to dispel them. Some guns were loaded with nails, ostensibly to kill the witches riding in the clouds; others were fired with powder alone through open empty barrels to make a great noise—perhaps, some said, to disrupt the electrical balance of the storm. In 1896 Albert Stiger, a vine grower in southeastern Austria and burgomaster of Windisch-Feistritz, revived the ancient tradition of
hagelschiessen
(hail shooting)—basically declaring “war on the clouds” by firing cannon when storms threatened.
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Faced with mounting losses from summer hailstorms that threatened his grapes, he attempted to disrupt, with mortar fire, the “calm before the storm,” or what he observed as a strange stillness in the air moments before the onset of heavy summer precipitation.

Stiger gained notoriety on his first attempt. A gentle rain in his valley reportedly accompanied his shooting on June 4, 1896, with damaging hail falling elsewhere. He experienced a very militant summer, shooting at the clouds on forty different occasions. His hail cannon were constructed from 12-inch iron mortars (or pipes) and were loaded with a quarter pound of black powder; but some of them burst upon firing. Their replacements were made of steel with funnel-shaped chimneys taken from the smokestacks of worn-out railway engines, which the state provided to Stiger and others free of charge. The devices resembled megaphones pointed vertically and were installed on strong bases made of oak, some with wheels for towing. Later models had a steel ring welded inside
the barrel to act as rifling, giving the discharged gases and smoke a distinct rotation and a whistling sound, said to be effective in agitating the air (figure 3.3).

3.3 International Congress on Hail Shooting, 1901

Stiger erected lines of small huts overlooking his valley, with the funnels of the hail cannon protruding through their roofs. They were spaced about half a mile apart and were located along ridgelines. These “hail forts” were staffed by a small army of officers, artillerists, and signalmen who systematically fired at the clouds. The huts served the dual function of getting the shooters a bit closer to the clouds and keeping them and their powder dry so that firing could proceed even in the pouring rain.

A number of sentries occupied mountain watchtowers during hail season. Their assignment was to sound a warning so that the artillerists could break up the ominous calm before a gathering storm. The forward sentry was the town's telegraph operator, who kept a magnetic dip needle in his office. When the instrument behaved erratically, its agitation was taken as an indication of the presence of great electrical tension in the air. Messages from nearby towns might also warn of advancing storms. The telegraph operator spread the warning locally by first hoisting a red flag, which alerted carriage operators and other drivers to keep a tight rein on their horses in anticipation of the coming barrage. Then he fired a
warning shot, which signaled the men to run to their posts to begin their fusillade of up to two shots per minute and up to a hundred shots per station per storm.

Although the efficacy of the system was never proved, the kaiser had a favorable opinion of it, and the technique spread to nearby countries. Some guns were sold in northern Italy by 1900, and some insurance companies decided to offer lower rates to growers within earshot of the hail cannon. Some provincial governments provided funds so that towns could appoint a general officer, instruct the artillerists, test and operate the cannon, and stockpile powder provided by the military. It was an exciting day in the neighborhood when the hail cannon started roaring. According to one commentator, the discharge was impressive: “From the mouth of the cannon issues a mass of heated gas, smoke, and smoke rings, propelled violently against the lowering cloud ... like puffs of a locomotive, but with far greater energy of propulsion ... a veritable gas attack in the realm of the aeronaut.”
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Even though no ammunition was involved, it was said that the power of the shot could kill small birds.

In 1907 the American meteorologist Cleveland Abbe, who had been publishing critiques of hail shooting since the turn of the century, reported the demise of the practice in Italy. A special commission of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome had just issued a report that concluded, after testing more than two hundred cannon and other explosive devices through the course of five summer seasons, that there was no rational basis for expecting the noise, smoke, heat, or grand vortex rings to have any significant effect on enormous hail-generating clouds that extended over 30,000 feet in height. The study indicated that the vortex rings issuing from the hail cannon reached no higher than about 300 feet above the surface and had no influence on the storm clouds. The commissioners recommended that the Italian government no longer encourage “such expensive and useless work.”
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Although official support waned, the practice lingered, for hope springs eternal, and on occasion the clouds did disperse following a bombardment. Given the enormous sense of relief felt by the grape growers, it was hard to convince them that their artillery had not shot the storm away.

Contemporary hail shooters still make noise in farming communities on the Great Plains of the United States. In the film
Owning the Weather
(2009), Mike Jones and his crew discharged a radio-controlled stovepipe-shaped cannon nestled inside a corral padded with bales of straw. They claimed that the cannon's whistling “sonic boom disrupts the formation of hail” and lessens the chances of its formation. Jones was aware of the checkered history of this practice, but claimed that a revival was under way because of new technologies and “new understanding of the physics involved.”
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Moreserious scientists were of the opinion that hail shooting gave a bad name to
weather modification practices. In 1926 William Jackson Humphreys denigrated the practice in the epigraph of his book: “Trying to avert or destroy the hailstorm whether by scare or by prayer, by shooting or electrocuting, has been one of our fatuous follies from the earliest times down to the very present.”
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William Suddards Franklin (1863–1930), a physics professor first at Lehigh University and later at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thought he understood atmospheric instability and how to use it for weather control. In 1901 he proposed to do something about hurricanes before they made landfall by exploding charges of gunpowder to initiate convection and thus dissipate a storm's source of energy before it could intensify. For Franklin, it was just an idea: “Please don't think that I have the machinery all designed and constructed to put this idea into effect. In fact I have made no experiments and do not know if the plan is at all practical.”
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Franklin speculated about controlling the weather by using small amounts of judiciously placed energy. Just as an unstable brick chimney might collapse in a gust of wind, so, in an unstable atmosphere, it might be possible to trigger storms by exploding 5 to 10 tons of powder. Using the domino effect as a metaphor, he pointed out how turning a “number of grasshoppers” loose in a room full of dominos would surely result in their collapse.
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Franklin was convinced that the atmosphere also responded to what he called “impetuous processes,” such as a single spark causing a raging fire or the movement of a single insect setting off a storm:

Such minute disturbances “may be the determining factor” in what Franklin called “atmospheric collapse,” triggering the time and place of severe “domino storms” downstream.
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Note that triggering unstable equilibrium processes is not the same as the butterfly effect, or more properly the Lorenz attractor, of Edward Lorenz's chaos theory. The set of nonlinear, three-dimensional, and deterministic solutions to the Lorenz oscillator, when graphed, resembles a butterfly. I once asked Ed if a butterfly could actually affect the Earth's general circulation, especially given viscosity. He smiled and said, “Perhaps if the butterfly was as big as the Rocky Mountains.” I call this the “Mothra effect.”

Franklin thought that the ultimate goal of meteorology was to devise a means for controlling storm movements by the suitable expenditure of energy at the critical time and place. Whether or not it could ever actually be realized, Franklin concluded, this was a “legitimate conception to say the least,” well worth the attention of meteorologists. He praised the smoke-ring cannon of Burgomaster Stiger as a possible means for controlling all kinds of storm movements and thought it might hold the key to weather control. After laying out the mathematics of the forecast problem and the need for some future computer to solve thousands of equations simultaneously, Franklin proposed a more prosaic method of protecting Florida, by “touching off” the local energy of the atmosphere when a hurricane approached. Imagine a line of overgrown hail cannon along the coast consisting of twenty or thirty very large open steel cones, 15 to 20 feet in diameter at the base, 40 to 50 feet in diameter at the top, and each 100 feet high, with a ton or more of gunpowder per cone to be exploded. This would drive the air in the cone (60,000 cubic feet of it) upward as a kind of giant “smoke ring” that would start a rising column of air, thus stealing this energy from the approaching hurricane. Although such a project could cost several million dollars, according to Franklin, the people of southern Florida would benefit if they funded it.
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Abbe thought that Franklin's suggestions were “not the best that science has to offer.” He pointed out that neither the concussions of cannonading nor Stiger's special vortex ring cannon had ever been proved to be effective. Abbe concluded, “The importance of unstable equilibrium in the atmosphere is a matter that has been so thoroughly investigated since the days of Espy that Professor Franklin has only to study the modern literature of meteorology and the mechanics of whirlwinds in order to realize the folly of his argumentation.”
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Abbe wanted experimental trial, not peasant-like faith. More than seventy years later, Ross Hoffman would again propose hurricane control using a distorted understanding of chaos theory as his guide (chapter 7).

In the 1880s and 1890s, intermittent drought conditions in Kansas and Nebraska, some regionally severe, combined with economic turmoil and crop failures to encourage farmers to seek the services of rainmakers. According to climatological records, the Midwest received nearly normal rainfall in 1891. Kansas and nearby states, however, experienced a summer dry spell (but not a full-blown drought) that was threatening to stunt the crops. The farmers, seeking to be proactive, contacted rainmaker Frank Melbourne—known variously as “the Australian,” “the Irish Rainmaker,” or “the Ohio Rain Wizard”—who promised a soaking areal rain for $500. “Let every farmer who is able act promptly and contribute to this fund,” advised the
Goodland News
, “and we will give to Goodland and Sherman county a valid boom such as they have never enjoyed before.”
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Plans were made for the rainmaker to be the star attraction of the county fair, along with horse racing, public speeches, and a grand evening ball. The governor and members of the State Board of Agriculture were invited as special guests, and the Rock Island Railroad announced reduced fares for all. Those opposed to the effort cited the hubris of meddling in the “Lord's business” and the dangers of unintended consequences such as setting off a tornado “that would blow the town from the face of the earth” (310).

The rainmaker arrived amid great fanfare, with his proprietary chemicals and rain machine. But he arrived slightly damp, since a period of unsettled weather had just begun and a light rain was already falling. Determined to collect his fee by wringing even more moisture out of the clouds, Melbourne (perhaps a model for Jeremy the “rain bat”) proceeded to the fairgrounds, where he mixed his chemicals in solitude on the second floor of a mysterious shed, especially erected to his specifications. The shed was cordoned off by a 20-foot rope perimeter patrolled by Melbourne's brother, who remained on the ground floor as a sort of bodyguard and bouncer. The general public could do little more than gaze at the shed, hoping to catch a glimpse of the “cloud making substances” escaping through a hole in the roof. Melbourne built up anticipation by releasing reports from neighboring towns announcing major rainfalls downwind, for which he took full credit. Ultimately, however, he failed to deliver on his contract. His excuse, which many accepted, was that conditions were not right for rainmaking ; the relatively cool nights and strong winds had rendered his chemicals and rain machine ineffective. Before leaving town for far-off engagements, never to return, Melbourne lined his pockets by selling his secret formula and copies of his rainmaking machines to local entrepreneurs. Soon three new enterprises—the Inter-State Artificial Rain Company, the Swisher Rain Company, and
the Goodland Artificial Rain Company—were sending “rain-making squads” throughout the region.
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