Page 137 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

round 3: Hartford, Connecticut

To save money and to be closer to home, Warren moved his operation yet again
in 1925, this time to the municipal airfield in Hartford, Connecticut. on the
basis of his rather meager successes in busting up fair-weather clouds—forty-
three successes and twenty-six failures in six years—he again petitioned for
research support from the army, navy, and post office. Warren argued that he
needed access to better airplanes that would be capable of reaching the very tops
of the clouds, “so that the rays of the sun will freely strike the walls of the wide
gashes cut in flight . . . and the electric action of our sand . . . will be reinforced
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and energized many fold by the radiant energy of the rays of the sun.” The army
and navy awarded him a grant of $15,000 and the services of some of its pilots,
but provided no new airplanes or equipment. Warren thought he deserved more.
Alexander McAdie witnessed the trials in Hartford and noted that the planes
had cleared a “figure 8” in the sky with their device—this, two decades before
General Electric announced a similar accomplishment using dry ice. Warren
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was quick to claim success. He telegraphed Bancroft that he had “knocked the
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stuffings out of two small clouds,” but this was not news; he had claimed this
five years earlier. With time running out on the grant, Warren told the press in
october, “our work here is finished. . . . We have clearly proved our theories
concerning the art of making it rain through the use of airplanes and are now in
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position to perfect our apparatus and equipment.” But he added, “There are
many things yet to be done.” Warren admitted that the atmosphere following
his cloud-busting test flights had “an uncanny and hard to describe look, effer-
vescent, like dissolved gas escaping under high pressure, or the sudden escape of
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steam, rolling and tumbling until it quickly disappears.” The press, previously
enthusiastic, was now turning skeptical. Warren worried that the news sto-
ries coming out were surrounded with a halo of unreality, “as wizard or witch-
doctor type of news—this needs to be debunked” (17). He could have well said that
his own nebulous ideas needed to be debunked. The world’s verdict to date was
“not proven” (16).

the business of “rainmaking”
Ever the businessman, Warren summarized his accomplishments, frustrations,
and fantasies in a pamphlet, Fact and Plans: Rainmaking—Fogs and Radiant
Planes (1928). Here he opined that “once rainmaking is mastered” through good
high-tension engineering, “the wealth and prosperity arising from increased

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