Page 63 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

Electric—a company he once said “was science fiction”—in what he called “this
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goddamn nightmare job.” At a time when the air force’s Project Cirrus was tak-
ing over the cloud-seeding business (chapter 5), Vonnegut published “Report
on the Barnhouse Effect,” a science fiction story in Collier’s that emphasizes an
inventor’s moral resistance to an attempted militarization of his invention. His
first novel, Player Piano (1952), was inspired by the mechanization he witnessed
at GE and deals with the demoralizing effects of vast corporations attempting to
use technology to automate everything and replace human labor with machines.
The setting is Illium, a fictitious town along the Iroquois River in New York State,
a dreary mill town dominated by a high-tech factory called Illium Works. In real-
ity, Schenectady, on the Mohawk River, is the home of General Electric, while
Illium is the ancient Roman name for Troy, which is also an industrial city near
Schenectady in New York.
While still at GE, Vonnegut heard about the visit of H. G. Wells to the plant
in the 1930s and how Irving Langmuir proposed a story idea to the famous nov-
elist and futurist involving a new form of water (ice-nine) that would freeze at
room temperature. Wells never wrote about this, but Vonnegut thought it might
someday be worth pursuing. Bernard Vonnegut had, in reality, identified the hex-
agonal structure of silver iodide (ice-six?) as a substance that could trigger natural
ice formation in clouds. Years later, Vonnegut used these ideas in his book Cat’s
Cradle (1963), where a quirky and amoral scientist named Felix Hoenikker, a loose
composite of Langmuir and H-bomb scientists Stanislaw Ulam and Edward Teller,
invents a water-like substance that instantly freezes everything it touches. When a
tiny crystal of “ice-nine” is brought into contact with liquid water, it stimulates the
molecules into arranging themselves into solid form.
Bernard obviously had a big influence on Kurt. Real-life meteorologist Craig
Bohren credited Cat’s Cradle with the “best discussion of nucleation” in print
and claimed that the novel contained more information on this subject than “all
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the physics textbooks written since the beginning of time.” Indeed, Langmuir
and Teller were reportedly fascinated by the theoretical possibility that a sub-
stance such as ice-nine could actually exist. In the book, Hoenikker’s intent is to
create a material that will be useful to armies bogged down in muddy battlefields,
but the result is an unprecedented ecological disaster that destroys the world.

* * * * *

Clearly, the practice of weather control is not restricted to the West, to modern
times, or to scientific practices. It has much deeper roots in world cultures and car-

46 | StorieS of Control