Fixing the Sky (8 page)

The Eighth Wonder: Working for Marvels
(1907), by William Wallace Cook, is a humorous “geoengineering” Western that was serialized in 1907 in the pulp magazine
Argosy
. In the badlands of North Dakota, Ira Xerxes Peck, an out-of-luck bicycle dealer, befriends a despondent but brilliant inventor, Copernicus Jones, who plans to corner the nation's electricity market by turning Horseshoe Butte, a naturally occurring iron formation, into the eighth wonder of the world, the world's largest electromagnet. It is to be Jones's Archimedean lever to move the world. “I don't think it pays, Copernicus,” Peck observes timidly, “to tinker with the machinery of the universe.... Not unless there's money in it.”
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When the titanic magnet is turned on, everything made of iron within a 25-mile radius—tools, pumps, wagons, threshing machines, even a sheet-iron house—flies through the air and adheres to the mountain. Jones is ecstatic, as in the myth of ships imperiled by the lodestone, “ancient fables come true in modern times ... that's what we call civilization and progress” (81).

Jones is more an inventor than a scientist, and his device actually fails to attract all the electricity from across the country. Instead, it begins to alter the seasons by deflecting the tilt of the Earth's axis. Jones takes credit for this unforeseen consequence and tries to capitalize on it by making the Northern Hemisphere permanently warmer: “We will corner the hot weather ... and we'll make the people pay for it! ... [W]e will select the brand of weather we want, and I will ... hold the Earth's axis at that precise inclination” (171–175). Ever his conscience, Peck reminds Jones that “tampering with the Earth's axis, Copernicus, brings responsibilities. We must not shut our eyes to that fact” (187).

The citizens of the world respond to Peck and Jones by insisting that tinkering with the seasons is a crime against nature. The industrialists are particularly adamant, since they made much of their money in cold weather and during changes of seasons. Parroting the claims of climatic determinists, they argue the
necessity of the yearly return of ice and snow to conserve the rugged character and “insistent energy” that has made the United States great, while pointing out that continuous warm weather would “sap our strength” (194): “The cold gives a zest to the blood that calls for achievement. In tropical countries the inhabitants are mostly dreamers, and excessive humidity paralyzes effort” (280).

Meanwhile, it appears that Jones did not really know what he was doing or the consequences of his actions. As Peck expresses it, “We were as two children, Copernicus and I, playing around powder with a box of matches” (197–199). Fame and fortune or infamy and prison are equal possibilities. For a ransom of $1 billion, the two geoengineers propose to stop their magnet, “leaving the seasons as we had found them.” In other words, they demand an exorbitant price to maintain the status quo. Peck and Jones fend off an attack on their installation by federal troops armed only with wooden clubs (because the magnetic force has stripped them of their metal weapons), but the iron butte is finally destroyed by a cannon bombardment, since the giant electromagnet actually acts to attract the incoming shells to it! Peck and Jones survive, but Jones has seemingly learned nothing, continuing his inventive scheming under an assumed name and promising, “If anything unusual happens you'll know who should have the credit.... I'm off for Europe ... to see what I can meddle with across the pond” (317–318).

A different genre of story tells of large-scale and catastrophic unintended consequences of tinkering in sensitive areas of the Earth's system.
The Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream
(1908), by Louis P. Gratacap, tells of geophysical and social dislocations caused by the collapse of the Isthmus of Panama, which diverts the Gulf Stream, causing vast climatic and social changes, including the refrigeration and depopulation of Europe.

The story begins with scientists' warnings about instabilities along the west coast of North and Central America that could result in massive geological chain reactions. Earthquakes could trigger the release of the “volcanic energy” of Panama and the West Indies, and the region could experience an “isostatic rebound”—basically a rebalancing of the Earth's crust—as it seeks a new equilibrium state. When Panama is breached (by either humans or geology), “again the waters of the two oceans will unite, and the impetuous violence of the rushing oceanic river, the Gulf Stream, that now races and boils through the Caribbean Sea, will fling its torrential waves across this divide into the Pacific.”
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In spite of these warnings, commercial interests and the president of the United States push for the completion of the Panama Canal (actually completed in 1914 at a cost of $400 million). In the book, the excavation commences in 1909 and triggers a natural disaster. A massive series of earthquakes and tidal waves strikes Colón. The isthmus sinks, opening up a passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific that had been closed for 3 million years. Subsidence in Panama results in volcanic eruptions and the catastrophic convergence and elevation of the Caribbean islands. The Earth shudders, the poles “wobble,” and the Gulf Stream, “no longer turned aside by impassible walls of land, triumphantly [sweeps] into the Pacific,” opening a “new chapter in the history of the world and the history of nations” (92–99). In an understated response, President Theodore Roosevelt is quoted as saying, “It seems likely that this physical alteration may mean a change in the climate of the older portion of the earth” and an end of “the glory of England” (121–123).

With the Gulf Stream now warming the Pacific coast of the United States, Europe descends into a new ice age as the North Atlantic cools dramatically and devastating snowstorms pummel the region. Like a scene out of the film
The Day After Tomorrow
(2004), Reykjavik lies deserted. In Edinburgh, snow “fill[s] up the deep moat of the Princes' Street gardens [and] round[s] the rugged edges and wandering parapets of the Citadel” (131–136). Europe trembles “with a new apprehension” as markets panic and moral depravity sets in. London is evacuated. As the savage Scots move south, the English seek refuge in their colonies in Asia and Australia. “Heat is life, cold is death.... Our civilization, the civilization of Europe, has overstepped the limits of climatic permission” (187, 295). All these consequences were triggered by a macro-engineering project that went against the advice of the geologists.

World peace as a consequence of the demands of a mad scientist is the theme of
The Man Who Rocked the Earth
(1915), by Arthur Train and Robert Williams Wood. With most of the world wracked by war, a mysterious message arrives by wireless from the inventor PAX: “To all mankind—I am the dictator—of human destiny—Through the earth's rotation—I control day and night—summer and winter—I command the—cessation of hostilities and—the abolition of war upon the globe.”
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To demonstrate his resolve and his power over the elements, PAX slows the Earth's rotation by five minutes; makes it snow in Washington, D.C., in August;
and, with a flying ring and super-powerful Lavender Ray, diverts the Mediterranean Sea into the Sahara and destroys a German siege gun as it fires on Paris. These phenomena are accompanied by geophysical marvels: strange yellow aurorae, earthquakes, tidal waves, and atmospheric disturbances. An international assembly of scientists is formed to respond, but it is designed by the diplomats to stall and fail in the hope that particular nations might gain special advantages by capturing the inventor and learning his powers.

PAX controls a source of power—atomic disintegration—that would allow the Earth to blossom “like the rose! Well-watered valleys where deserts were before. War abolished, poverty, disease!” This is reminiscent of the rhetoric, some forty years later, hyping the potential of atomic energy. Impressed, physicist Bennie Hooker sets out to find PAX and the secret behind “the greatest achievement of all time!” (111).

Meanwhile, disappointed by cease-fire violations, PAX sends his final warning to humanity, declaring that he will “shift the axis of the Earth until the North Pole shall be in the region of Strasbourg and the South Pole in New Zealand” (172). Hooker eventually finds PAX's laboratory in Labrador and witnesses his demise in an explosion near a gigantic outcrop of pitchblende: “This radioactive mountain was the fulcrum by which this modern Archimedes had moved the Earth” (216). Anticipating the founding of the League of Nations by several years, the nations of the Earth form a coalition government coordinated at The Hague and destroy all their armaments, an event that inaugurates a new age of international cooperation, peace, and never-before-experienced prosperity. In a setup to a possible sequel, Hooker is last seen exploring the solar system in his “Space-Navigating Car,” powered by the Lavender Ray.

The Air Trust
(1915), by George Allan England, combines both geochemical and political fantasy in telling the story of a dedicated band of socialists who thwart the plans of ruthless capitalists aiming to control the world's air supply. The book is dedicated to Eugene V. Debs, “Comrade Gene, Apostle of the World's Emancipation.” The author depicts scientists for hire as the willing servants of capitalists and the obedient executioners of both corporate plans and, possibly, humanity. England writes in the foreword: “I believe that, had capitalists been able to bring the seas and the atmosphere under physical control, they would long ago [have done so].”

The story begins when billionaire businessman Isaac Flint, seeking new and ever more powerful monopolies, asks:

His business partner, Maxim “Tiger” Waldron, suggests “The Air Trust—A monopoly on breathing privileges!... Imagine that we might extract oxygen from the air.... [P]eople would come gasping to us, like so many fish out of water, falling over each other to buy!” (23–25).

The businessmen delegate responsibility for the details and the execution of the plan to the industrial research staff (“That's what they're for”) as personified by the chemist Herzog—“a fat rubicund, spectacled man” with a keen mind, two fingers missing (from experimenting with explosives), and “character and stamina close to those of a jelly fish” (29). In the novel, the oxygen extraction plant is located at Niagara Falls and uses hydropower to run the condensers. The book includes sufficient technical details about the extraction process and the scale of the operation to suspend readers' disbelief while clearly drawing an analogy to the nitrogen fixation process developed about 1909 by the German chemist Fritz Haber and industrialized in 1913 by Carl Bosch. Benefits of commodifying the air include the sale of liquid gas refrigerants, nitrogen for fertilizer and explosives, and even ozone to “freshen and purify” the environment. But by far the most precious commodity is oxygen, the breath of life. As Flint expresses it, “We'll have the world by the wind pipe; and let the mob howl
then
, if they dare!” (69).

The plot turns around the loss of Flint's notebook, which alerts the socialist hero, Gabriel Armstrong, to the plan. He and his comrades passionately debate the need to destroy the “infernally efficient tyrants” who have taken possession of “all that science has been able to devise, or press and church and university teach, or political subservience make possible.” The capitalists control “military power, and the courts and the prisons and the electric chair and the power to choke the whole world to submission, in a week!” If the socialists can destroy the Air Trust, “the great revolution will follow” to annihilate capitalism (261–262).

After working out a strategy of attack, the workers organize and, led by Armstrong, storm the plant. In a scene worthy of a Saturday matinee, they chase Flint
and Waldron into one of the huge empty air tanks, as the chemist Herzog takes his own life with a vial of poison. The final scene is both ghastly and ghoulishly amusing as Waldron notices the odor of ozone and cries out, “
Flint! Flint! The oxygen is coming in!
” (325) As a huge stream of pure oxygen from a ruptured valve floods the tank, the brains of Flint and Waldron literally began to “combust”:

With a final burst of energy, “his heart flailing itself to death under the pitiless urge of the oxygen,” Flint runs across the tank screaming blasphemies and slams into the opposite wall, where he falls sprawling, stone dead. Tiger Waldron attempts a final dash up the ladder to reach the door at the top of the tank. “Fifty feet he made, seventy-five, ninety”—until his overtaxed heart too bursts and he falls to his death. “And still the rushing oxygen, with which they two had hoped to dominate the world, poured [in]—senseless matter, blindly avenging itself upon the rash and evil men who impiously had sought to cage and master it!” (328).