Page 139 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

Warren blamed the equipment, the hired help, government red tape, his poor
health, even interservice rivalries for his shortcomings; however, he never
doubted his theory. Bancroft had invested tens of thousands of his own dol-
lars in the fog-clearing and rainmaking project, but after eight years he had
little to show for it—only some minor cloud-busting demonstrations, War-
ren’s promises, and worthless shares of stock. By 1927 Bancroft had decided
that it was time to cut his losses—and his losses ran deep. Rumor has it that
to cover his investments, he even sold a copy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
given to the family by his grandfather. Warren reacted to Bancroft’s pullout
with shock and dismay, and then with recriminations of his own, going all
the way back to the Dayton experiments, when, he said, Bancroft had “injured
rather than helped the cause” with his aloofness and air of superiority. There
is evidence that as late as February 1929, Warren was still hanging on, trying
to persuade aviation moguls to fund him, trying to issue stock for a new com-
pany, and, unbelievably, still trying to solicit money from Bancroft. There
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the trail fades away, possibly obliterated by the stock market crash, but there
is ample material in the Bancroft Papers on this and other ventures to reward a
potential biographer. In 1938, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his
college graduation, Bancroft wrote to his Harvard classmates: “owing to my
lifelong habit of being a minority of one on all occasions, my research work
does not look convincing to most people. Since I have become avowedly a
specialist in unorthodox ideas in the last decade the situation is getting worse,
because now I irritate more people.” In addition to the electrified sand epi-
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sode, he was referring to questions raised by the medical community concern-
ing his excursion into the supposed colloidal chemistry of the human nervous
system and his theory of anesthesia. In other episodes, Bancroft’s attempts to
articulate a general chemical explanation of poisoning, drug addiction, alco-
holism, and insanity, and his fumbling, and some say unethical, experiments
with human subjects brought him into direct conflict with the larger research
community and damaged his scientific reputation. There was more to it than
just electrified sand.

fog research at mit

“Fog dissipating has, on the one hand, attracted the attention of crack-pot inven-
tors, and on the other, occupied the minds of sober, able investigators. So it is
that there have been visionary grandiose ideas of ridding harbors and airports
alike of fog. The scale of operations implied together with the lack of factual data

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