Page 28 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

Scientific rainmakers take the historical stage in chapter 2. The story of con-
trol begins with the aspirations of Sir Francis Bacon and continues as a legacy of
the historiographically contentious scientific revolution. Enlightened dreamers,
enamored by the notion of progress, enthusiastically sought to understand, pre-
dict, and ultimately control the weather and climate. But did they reveal nature’s
deepest secrets or abuse our deepest sensibilities? The distinguished American
meteorologist James Espy wanted to control rainfall with great fires, a problem-
atic goal that, if ever accomplished, would have raised immense ethical dilem-
mas. Another group wanted to cannonade the clouds to wring out their mois-
ture, but succeeded mainly in entertaining onlookers with pyrotechnic displays.
The notion of progress was such a heady surety that it seemed that anything was
possible; not even the sky was the limit. Surely things are much different now.
or are they?
Chapter 3 examines the rain fakers, the charlatans or confidence men who
lived by their wits and accepted payment from desperate and gullible farmers
for their questionable services. Hail shooting falls into this category, as do the
Kansas and Nebraska proprietary rainmakers of the 1880s and 1890s. Charles
Hatfield, the “moisture accelerator,” was a charlatan’s charlatan who mixed his
proprietary chemicals and dispensed them from high towers at considerable
profit in the first three decades of the twentieth century. George Ambrosius
Immanuel Morrison Sykes, who scammed the Belmont Park racetrack in the
1930s; Wilhelm Reich, who scammed his followers in the 1950s; Irving Krick,
who practiced commercial cloud seeding over most of the American West; and
the Provaqua project, which just recently tried to scam the citizens of Laredo,
Texas, serve to illustrate the perennial nature of these questionable but humorous
(at least from a distance) practices. Ironically, the rainmakers and the rain fakers
employed surprisingly similar techniques, although the former actually believed
in what they were doing, while the latter clearly did not.
Chapter 4 focuses on fog removal in the era of early aviation. As the airplane
provided a new platform for aerial experimentation, it also raised the stakes for
aviation safety and military efficiency. Teams of experimenters, some working
largely on their own and some with the full support of governments, tried elec-
trical, chemical, and physical methods of fog removal. These included attacking
clouds with electrified sand, spraying calcium chloride on airports, and burning
hundreds of thousands of gallons of gasoline in a brute-force effort to keep the
Royal Air Force aloft and return its pilots safely. The chapter ends with a look
at the “airs of the future,” both indoors and out. The rising popularity of air-
conditioning in the 1930s was an approach to weather and climate control that

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