Page 151 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

measurements using radiosondes and broadcasts that would allow “records to be
flashed to all parts of the world.” Charles Franklin Brooks foresaw remote sensing of
the atmosphere using ultra-high-frequency radio transmissions. J. Cecil Alter sug-
gested that “sky-sweeping robots of electric eyes will explore the upper atmosphere
for air mass demarcations, depths, direction and velocity movement, moisture con-
tent, and other factors. Zigzag tracings or photographic replicas, automatically reg-
istered, will be made of the shape of the course of the refracted ray from the electric
eye, as it passes through different air masses.” Humphreys wrote of “robot report-
53
ers—instruments that not only keep a continuous record of the weather elements,
but which, at the touch of a button, or automatically at regular intervals, also tell
all about the weather there at the time” (215). These predictions were largely real-
ized through the development of weather radar and other forms of remote sensing.
Also, in 1939, George W. Mindling foretold, in doggerel, of the “coming perpetual
visiontone show” of perfect surveillance and perfect prediction using television and
infrared sensors, a technology instituted in the TIRoS (Television Infrared obser-
vation Satellite) meteorological satellite program in 1960:

In the coming perpetual visiontone show
We shall see the full action of storms as they go.
We shall watch them develop on far away seas,
And we’ll plot out their courses with much greater ease.
Then a new day will come in electrical lore
When the pictures will register very much more. . . .
Then a day there will be when predictions won’t fail,
Though describing the weather in every detail,
Just what minute ’twill rain, even when it will hail. 54

These lines in Mindling’s poem are preceded by seven stanzas praising the radio-
sonde and followed by two stanzas anticipating that weather forecasting might
someday attain the accuracy of astronomical predictions.
Two of Gregg’s respondents spun wild fantasies involving geoengineering.
Major E. H. Bowie of the San Francisco weather bureau office facetiously suggested
that the only way to end the dust bowl was through a Works Progress Administra-
tion project to lower the height of the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains.
T. A. Blair of Lincoln, Nebraska, issued this ominous forecast for a weather control
agency and a “war for the control the air masses,” a full century into the future:

In the year 2038 an American meteorologist discovers how to control the
weather. . . . But difficulties arise. This control involves a shifting of the air masses

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