Page 131 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

up my heels away from home.” Detained in Washington over a weekend, Warren
ended his letter to Bancroft with a list of his possible activities, including “attend-
ing the aviators ball at Langley Field, playing in the parks with the kids on Sun-
day, or flirting with the hat girls at the restaurants.” 9
His lobbying efforts eventually paid off, though, and the army provided funds
for an initial field test. In the summer of 1921, Warren contracted for electrical
work to be done by the physicist Chaffee at Harvard’s Cruft High Tension Elec-
trical Laboratory. Chaffee examined the theoretical basis for charging small parti-
cles with high voltage, built a generator that would run off an aircraft motor, and
designed the best way to disperse the sand, which he determined was through an
electrically energized nozzle and the prop backwash. Warren arrived in Dayton
10
on September 7 and began to install equipment on the aircraft. The army paid
to bring Chaffee out at $25 a day plus expenses, but Warren chose to stay off the
payroll to protect his business rights, since he was then in the process of applying
for multiple international patents. The U.S. Army Air Service provided him with
two planes, pilots and observers, a car and driver, a stenographer, and a coordi-
nating officer—Major T. H. Bane. Not all was going smoothly, however. Warren
had fallen behind on payments to his creditors and, as usual, was writing to Ban-
croft seeking financial aid “to help me out of this mess.” His plan was to “go above
detached clouds and try to cause precipitation in the form of trailing rain. We
should be able to pull this stunt off within ten days, I hope.” 11
In the “stunts” (they can hardly be called experiments), a La Pere plane flying
above the cloud tops sprinkled sand charged to approximately 10,000 volts by an
on-board wind-driven generator. The electrified sand was dispensed through mus-
ket-shaped nozzles (figure 4.1) and further scattered across the clouds by the action
of the airplane’s propeller. Sometimes, but only sometimes, these aerial “attacks”
opened clearings in fair-weather cumulus clouds or dissipated them completely.
Although the stated goal of the project was to clear airport fogs and generate rain,
no tests were conducted on low-level stratus or nimbus clouds. other than a dra-
matic exhibition of the prowess of aviators (it was known at the time that the back-
wash from propellers alone could bust up clouds by mixing them with surrounding
drier air), nobody knew why the electrified sand technique should work.
Alluding in vague terms to small-scale smoke-clearing demonstrations under
laboratory conditions, Warren offered up some technical mumbo jumbo about
the effect of electrified sand particles accelerating the “free electrons in a mass
of air.” He told the press and his patrons (but never published) his theory that
“each electron attaches itself to a certain number of molecules and so forms a gas
12
ion, upon which moisture condenses, thereby making a cloud particle.” He
claimed that his technique produced “a so-called trigger action, forcing the elec-

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