Page 54 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

The story begins when billionaire businessman Isaac Flint, seeking new and
ever more powerful monopolies, asks:

What is it they all must have, or do, that I can control? . . . Breathing! . . . Breath is
life. Without food and drink and shelter, men can live a while. Even without water,
for some days. But without air—they die inevitably and at once. And if I make my
own, then I am the master of all life! . . . Life, air, breath—the very breath of the
world in my hands—power absolutely, at last! 14

His business partner, Maxim “Tiger” Waldron, suggests “The Air Trust—A mono-
poly on breathing privileges! . . . Imagine that we might extract oxygen from the
air. . . . [P]eople would come gasping to us, like so many fish out of water, falling
over each other to buy!” (23–25).
The businessmen delegate responsibility for the details and the execution of
the plan to the industrial research staff (“That’s what they’re for”) as personi-
fied by the chemist Herzog—“a fat rubicund, spectacled man” with a keen mind,
two fingers missing (from experimenting with explosives), and “character and
stamina close to those of a jelly fish” (29). In the novel, the oxygen extraction
plant is located at Niagara Falls and uses hydropower to run the condensers.
The book includes sufficient technical details about the extraction process and
the scale of the operation to suspend readers’ disbelief while clearly drawing an
analogy to the nitrogen fixation process developed about 1909 by the German
chemist Fritz Haber and industrialized in 1913 by Carl Bosch. Benefits of com-
modifying the air include the sale of liquid gas refrigerants, nitrogen for fertil-
izer and explosives, and even ozone to “freshen and purify” the environment.
But by far the most precious commodity is oxygen, the breath of life. As Flint
expresses it, “We’ll have the world by the wind pipe; and let the mob howl then,
if they dare!” (69).
The plot turns around the loss of Flint’s notebook, which alerts the socialist
hero, Gabriel Armstrong, to the plan. He and his comrades passionately debate
the need to destroy the “infernally efficient tyrants” who have taken possession of
“all that science has been able to devise, or press and church and university teach,
or political subservience make possible.” The capitalists control “military power,
and the courts and the prisons and the electric chair and the power to choke the
whole world to submission, in a week!” If the socialists can destroy the Air Trust,
“the great revolution will follow” to annihilate capitalism (261–262).
After working out a strategy of attack, the workers organize and, led by Arm-
strong, storm the plant. In a scene worthy of a Saturday matinee, they chase Flint

StorieS of Control | 37