Page 104 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

the Goodland Artificial Rain Company—were sending “rain-making squads”
throughout the region. 19
In 1894 the American Meteorological Journal reported that entrepreneurial
rainmakers had succeeded in convincing a number of people, and even some pay-
ing clients, that they could, for a price and with the proper chemicals, draw down
moisture from the arid skies. The Kansas City Star reported that the rainmakers
possessed good timing, for they often commenced their experiments just as rain
was due, convincing the gullible onlookers that their success was no coincidence.
It did not hurt that, according to climatological records, rainfall was near normal
in the region in 1893 and 1894. 20
In those years, the Rock Island Railroad Company maintained a popular
rainmaking department and hauled a special car along the tracks with an agent
who claimed not to be producing rain but to be assisting nature in the task by
supplying certain missing (but unnamed) elements to the atmosphere through
concussions, gaseous mixtures, and electrical discharges. By 1894 the railroad
had developed ten such rainmaking outfits, frequently deploying three units at
a time to operate in tandem. Clinton B. Jewell, the railroad’s chief dispatcher,
offered his rainmaking services free of charge. His mobile rainmaking car,
inspired by Dyrenforth’s experiments and outfitted at company expense with
what Jewell claimed were the secret chemicals and apparatus of Melbourne, rode
the rails as a kind of traveling fireworks and vaudeville show, detonating dyna-
mite, launching exploding balloons and rockets, and dispensing foul-smelling
volatile gases charged with electricity, the last said to chill the air to enhance
condensation. He promised to deliver “Kansas Weather” to his clients across
the Midwest. 21
Jewell gave reporters a tour of his car and a briefing on his procedures. He
said his gas formula used “metallic sodium, ammonia, black oxide of manganese,
caustic potash, and aluminum,” these mixed with an “alloy known as murium,”
an imaginary radical thought to be an active agent in hydrochloric acid. These
materials were both toxic and potentially explosive. When rain was to be pro-
duced, Jewell parked his car on a side track and filled an 800-gallon tank on the
roof with water. Inside the car’s laboratory was a wide shelf laden with bottles of
chemicals and various sorts of apparatus. Under the shelf were large locked boxes,
which were never opened in the presence of visitors. A second shelf supported a
twenty-four-cell battery connected with wires to a very large jar. Another set of
wires ran to the “rain machine proper,” which consisted of six large jars grouped
by twos in which the gas was made and from which it was released from the car
through three pipes. other pipes, bottles, and vessels completed the scene, mak-
ing the car look like a small chemistry laboratory. Jewell explained that no force

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