Page 128 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

claimed, were themselves due to political and economic changes, including the
American Revolution, the inflated price of grain, and heavy taxation on labor
and agriculture. It was a view that sprang from the author’s personal malaise and
a generally unsettled mood in Britain. Williams argued that the newly “ungenial
seasons” might be ameliorated by building electrical mills, two per county, with
giant rotating cylinders to diffuse excess electrical fluid into the surrounding air.
He imagined that the newly electrified air would then act to dissolve fogs and
dissipate rain clouds. The electrical mills were never built, and the British, as
ever, are still damning their damp and cloudy climate and discussing their “pecu-
liar weather,” with no ready answers as to what, if anything, is wrong with it or
how, if at all possible, to fix it. 4
In the 1830s, the American chemist Robert Hare, a professor at the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania, promoted an electrical theory of storms. He imagined that
the atmosphere behaved like a charged Leyden jar with two electrical oceans of
opposite charge: the celestial and the terrestrial. Clouds acted as the mediators
between the two, suspended like pith balls in a static electrical field. When the
electrical balance was disturbed, the atmosphere behaved in a way that coun-
teracted gravity. The net result was a local diminution of pressure, inducing
inward- and upward-rushing currents of air that resulted in rain, hail, thunder,
lightning, and, in extreme cases, tornadoes. Hare argued strenuously that he
had discovered a new electrical “discharge by convection” in the atmosphere,
which formed the motive power of storms and was to be considered the com-
plement of the famous electrical discharge by conduction discovered by Frank-
lin in lightning strokes. 5
In 1884 British physicist oliver Lodge demonstrated that smoke and dust
can be precipitated by the discharge of a static electric machine. He then asked,
6
“Why should not natural precipitation be assisted artificially?” In his largest-
scale experiment, he cleared a smoke-filled room and discovered that electrical
charges encourage the coalescence of infinitesimally small cloud droplets into
“Scotch mist or fine rain.” He opined that clearing London fogs and abating
industrial or urban smoke might be a “difficult but perhaps not impossible task,”
equivalent to such other noble quests as navigating the Arctic ocean, exploring
the Antarctic continent, scaling Mount Everest, and conquering tropical diseases.
Lodge regarded the future prospects with hope and felt that the control of the
atmosphere “will be tackled either now or by posterity” (34). But applying this
technique outdoors was another matter, and he admitted the propensity of phys-
icists “to rush in where meteorologists fear to tread!” Thus the stage was set for
the cloud modifiers to add electricity to their tool kit as they attempted to make
rain and dissipate fogs.

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