Page 133 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

the other sciences involved in the experiment, I do not wish to be understood as
expressing any opinion as to the practical value of the experiment nor of the pos-
sibilities that may develop from them.” Navy commander Karl F. Smith was also
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watching. His memo, “Dr. Warren—Rainmaker,” noted that as an observer he was
“not gullible and had remained skeptical,” but seeing a cloud split in two by the tech-
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nique was “absolutely uncanny.” The military applications were obvious. Smith
envisioned special-purpose “clearing ships” for enhancing aerial navigation by dis-
sipating fog or for cutting holes in clouds for bombing operations while keeping the
main cloud bank intact for cover. Although he was not fully convinced, he thought
Warren’s technique “so important” that, after a few more trials, the U.S. Navy
Bureau of Aeronautics should either present it to the Patent office or purchase out-
right Warren’s rights and retain them for military purposes. Had Warren agreed, he
could have cashed in on his invention then and there. Instead, he reserved his rights,
immediately formed the A. R. Company (for “Artificial Rain”), and issued Bancroft
1,000 shares of stock at $5 a share. He also filed a U.S. patent application for “Con-
densing, Coalescing, and Precipitating Atmospheric Moisture.” 15
When the story was initially reported in the newspapers, cartoonists immedi-
ately got to work. one set of panels published in the New York World fantasized
about using the technique for raining out Sunday baseball games, ruining a rival’s
new hat, fighting fires, disrupting parades, and selling umbrellas (figure 4.2).
In March 1923, one month after the initial publicity, U.S. Weather Bureau
librarian and widely read weather popularizer Charles Fitzhugh Talman
reported that meteorologists remained unconvinced by the Dayton tests. In
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a weather bureau press release, William Jackson Humphreys contrasted the
puny efforts of the rainmakers with the enormous scale of the atmosphere and
called their techniques “entirely futile.” He compared the techniques of Ban-
croft and Warren with those of earlier rain kings: “The idea of the college pro-
fessor and his aviator friends out in Cleveland, to sprinkle electrically charged
sand on a cloud while above it in an airplane, is picturesque and plausible,” he
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noted, “but won’t work in commercial quantities.” Given the enormous forces
at work in the atmosphere, Humphreys warned farmers in arid regions not to
pay out their good money for so-called rainmaking devices: “Wet weather a la
carte—the dream of meteorologists, farmers, and umbrella salesmen for a good
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many years—is still an empty mirage.” In response, Bancroft wrote: “No use
arguing with Weather Bureau. Prefer to wait for results and let them do the
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explaining.” A cartoonist captured the tension between the new high-tech
possibilities and domestic farm life, with the grizzled older man representing
both worlds (figure 4.3).

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