Page 116 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

Commission revealed that to run his contraption, Sykes had “borrowed” some
32,400 kilowatts of electric power daily from the grid without the knowledge of
Consolidated Edison; this resulted in local power failures and an official warning
to Sykes not to do that again.
The weather remained fair and dry that week, save for a light mist on the
final Saturday, and the Weather Control Bureau netted $8,000, with additional
income derived from side contracts and bets, some with local mobsters. To cele-
brate, Mrs. Sykes threw a party for several hundred people at the Hotel Imperial
in Manhattan, replete with chamber music, dancing long into the night, and end-
less bowls of Pisco Punch. All was well, but it did not end well. When report-
ers accused Sykes of just being lucky, he announced, perhaps after one too many
drinks, that he would prove his power by throwing his machinery into reverse to
produce torrents of rain between 2:30 and 4:30 on the next Monday afternoon.
The odds were heavily against him; Stingo likened it to “breaking up a full house
to draw for four of a kind.” It did not rain that afternoon, and a “deluge of deri-
sion” broke over Sykes and the Weather Control Bureau, resulting in the loss of
40
pending future contracts at Belmont and Churchill Downs (47–48). Thus,
according to Stingo, the rainmaker’s art was eclipsed, not to be revived for a score
of years, next time not with old Ford motors, radios, and secret chemicals, but
with airplanes, dry ice, and silver iodide (chapter 5).

Seeding the american West

Irving P. Krick (1906–1996) was a talented, charismatic “rainmaker” in both the
business sense and the meteorological sense. The term that adheres most read-
ily to him is “maverick.” Krick was a child prodigy on piano as well as a student
of physics. After completing his doctorate in meteorology at Caltech, he helped
establish the university’s Department of Meteorology, but he lacked a strong
theoretical background. The program he developed emphasized the training of
applied meteorologists, especially for the rapidly growing airline industry. Krick
himself spent most of his time developing the Krick Weather Service, of Pasa-
dena, California, using department space and weather bureau equipment. He
specialized in speculative ultra-long-range forecasts, which the U.S. Weather
Bureau considered doubtful. Krick gained a moment of fame by forecasting calm
winds for the set of Gone with the Wind the night the burning of Atlanta was
filmed. His forecasts were based on so-called analog methods using data from
historic maps, which he codified for use with a simple slide-rule gadget. The
forecasts were also tailored to be just what the client wanted to hear. Filmmakers

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