Page 101 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

weather modification practices. In 1926 William Jackson Humphreys deni-
grated 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.” 11

Hurricane Cannon

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.” 12
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
13
dominos would surely result in their collapse. 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:

Imagine a warm layer of air near the ground overlaid with cold air. Such a condi-
tion of the atmosphere is unstable, and any disturbance, however minute, may con-
ceivably start a general collapse. Thus a grasshopper in Idaho might conceivably ini-
tiate a storm movement, which would sweep across the continent and destroy New
York City, or a fly in Arizona might initiate a storm movement, which would sweep
out harmlessly into the Gulf of Mexico. These results are different surely, and the
grasshopper and the fly may be of entirely unheard-of varieties, more minute and
insignificant than anything assignable. Infinitesimal differences in the earlier stages
of an impetuous process may, therefore, lead to finite differences in the final trend
of the process. 14

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