Page 153 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

I am writing this book in Maine, in the summer, under a tree, without air-condi-
tioning. I do not have it in my office, and I do not need it in my home. With a base-
ment dehumidifier, window screens, fans, and a lake conveniently nearby, I have
no need at all to be sequestered from the open air. In fact, I found creative writ-
ing to be nearly impossible while on sabbatical, cooped up as I was in the elegant
air-conditioned buildings of Washington, D.C. There I focused on doing library
and archival research, giving and attending seminars, and otherwise broadening
my horizons while avoiding the heat of the day. It seems to me that climate delib-
erations in the U.S. capital will be conducted indoors, in air-conditioned buildings
sequestered from the summer heat of Washington. Some of the people making the
decisions might even be advocates for a Weather Distributing Administration.

* * * * *

The rise of civilian and military aviation in the early decades of the twentieth cen-
tury placed fog clearing at the center of the research-and-development agenda.
The airplane provided a new tool and a new research platform, and its vulnerabil-
ity to fog provided a new urgency. New theories of electrical influence, chemical
affinity, and large-scale combustion were put to the test. of the three case histo-
ries presented here, L. Francis Warren was the most speculative, and Wilder Ban-
croft ended up the biggest loser, in both credibility and financial terms; Henry
Houghton’s reputation as a careful researcher grew, even if his applications failed;
and FIDo actually worked and may even have helped the British war effort, but
at an immense cost that rendered it impractical after the war when the question
of national survival was no longer at issue.
Cloud physics and chemistry got its start in this era, as did serious attempts to
make smoke screens and dissipate clouds. So too did air-conditioning, which grew
by leaps and bounds from a novelty to a seeming necessity for larger and larger
spaces. In common with later eras, weather control research before 1944 benefited
from military patronage and the passing interest, if not support, of large corpora-
tions like General Electric. T. A. Blair’s 1938 vision of dystopian climate control
in the distant future now seems a spooky possibility in the not-so-distant future.
These themes, mutatis mutandis, would reemerge in the work of an articulate,
highly credentialed spokesperson: Irving Langmuir.

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