Page 142 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

the science advisory board of the Commanding General of the Air Force, and
was the first board chairman of the University Corporation for Atmospheric
Research (UCAR), in 1959. He also sustained a lifelong interest in weather con-
trol. In 1951, in conjunction with the American Meteorological Society, he pre-
pared an appraisal of cloud seeding as a means of increasing precipitation, con-
tributed to discussions about weather warfare (chapter 6), and in 1968 published
a review of precipitation mechanisms and their artificial modification in the
Journal of Applied Meteorology. 33
A story in Time in 1934 described a test of Houghton’s chemical “fog broom,”
conducted at the private airfield of eccentric millionaire Colonel Edward How-
land Robinson Green on his Round Hill estate overlooking Buzzards Bay. Hough-
ton had erected a large scaffold across the runway to support a maze of piping and
nozzles, “patterned after the business end of a skunk,” that he claimed offered “the
first practically-tested way of artificially dissipating fog over local areas” (figure
4.5). As a bank of thick fog rolled in from the ocean, Houghton powered up his
“secret” apparatus. As the Time reporter described it, “Centrifugal pumps sent a

4.5 Henry G. Houghton standing on the chemical fog dissipation apparatus at the
MIT research station near South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Colonel Edward Howland
Robinson Green’s mansion and the mast of a whaling ship can be seen in the background.
(National Archives Photo 27-G-1A-8–48)

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