Page 48 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

The Great Weather Syndicate

Weather and climate control, war, gender, and romance are juxtaposed in The
Great Weather Syndicate (1906), by George Griffith. In the novel, Arthur Ark-
wright, a young British engineer, develops a machine that modifies the weather
by drilling atmospheric holes to redirect the winds and clouds. This inven-
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tion promises to make him the “master of the fate of the world.” Working
through investors in the World Weather Syndicate, Arkwright sets up a chain
of mountain stations equipped with “atmospheric disintegrators” that proj-
ect impulses powerful enough to break up and dissipate clouds while creat-
ing partial vacuums or “holes” in the atmosphere. By coordinating its efforts,
the Syndicate can determine the direction of winds and weather over any area
within the range of its stations. Controlling the weather of the whole world,
then, is simply a matter of multiplying the number of stations. The Syndi-
cate “will enable us to run the world’s weather and sell it out to the countries
which need any particular brand at our own price” (86). For example, the Gulf
Stream can be altered by this technique to benefit those willing to pay. Ark-
wright’s love interest, Eirene, the daughter of his chief investor, introduces
moral objections:

Now I think it’s wicked. You’re going to upset the order of nature, you’re going to
make hot countries cold and cold countries hot, just so you can make profits out of
them; but have you thought of all the misery and starvation and all sorts of horrors
that you are going to bring upon innocent work-people who won’t have a notion
of what’s really going on; how you will make fertile places into deserts and ruin
farmers and manufacturers and all the people depending on them just because the
Government of the country won’t pay your price for the weather they want? No,
it’s just wicked. (12)

An opposing syndicate has a “pretty big idea” of its own (15). It proposes to
dam the Arctic ocean across the Bering Sea, Baffin’s Bay, and Spitzbergen to
stop all the icebergs from coming south and bottle up the Arctic ocean until
ice builds up there. The excess weight will then shift the axis of the Earth and
cause a general redistribution of the map of the world—land, sea, and weather
all included. If this evil syndicate gains control of the Earth’s axis, a struggle
will ensue for control of the world’s weather, which can “only result in disas-
ter to mankind” (73). Arkwright thus finds himself “at the beginning of a war
for the economic control of the world,” and he proposes to win “by any means

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