Page 76 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

human dimensions and of the pitfalls of weather control than anything Espy
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ever wrote.” Since then, however, the intractable human dimensions of
weather and climate control have taken a backseat to the technical schemes of
optimistic rain kings and climate engineers with relatively simple ideas, or at
least angles.
Espy received honorable mention in 1843 in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Hall
of Fantasy”—a marketplace of wild ideas that most of us visit at least once but
some dreamers occupy permanently; a marketplace seemingly perfectly suited
to the millennial ideas of rain kings and climate engineers. Here the statues of
the rulers and demigods of imagination—Homer, Dante, Milton, Goethe—are
memorialized in stone, while those of more limited and ephemeral fame are
made of wood. Plato’s Idea looms over all. Here are social reformers, abolition-
ists, and Second Adventist “Father [William] Miller himself!” Civil and social
engineers propound ideas of “cities to be built, as if by magic, in the heart of
pathless forests; and of streets to be laid out, where now the sea was tossing; and
of mighty rivers to be stayed in their courses, in order to turn the machinery
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of a cotton-mill.” “Upon my word,” exclaimed Hawthorne, “it is dangerous to
listen to such dreamers as these! Their madness is contagious” (204). Here are
inventors of fantastic machines aimed to “reduce day dreams to practice”: mod-
els of a railroad through the air, a tunnel under the sea, distilling machines for
capturing heat from moonshine and for condensing morning mist into square
blocks of granite, and a lens for making sunshine out of a lady’s smile. “Professor
Espy was here,” reminiscent of Aeolus, the god of the winds, “with a tremendous
storm in a gum-elastic bag” (206). The “inmates of the hall,” it is said (remember
that all pass through here on occasion), take up permanent residence by throw-
ing themselves into “the current of a theory,” oblivious to the “landmarks of fact”
passing along the stream’s bank.

Cannon and bells

Charles Le Maout (1805–1887), a pharmacist and mine assayer in Saint-Brieuc,
near the coast of Brittany, was a dedicated pacifist. one of his powerful argu-
ments in favor of peace went far beyond typical arguments invoking the carnage,
desolation, and miseries of war. He thought that war, especially cannonading
but also the ringing of bells, destroyed the fragile equilibrium of the aerial ele-
ments and was responsible for undesirable atmospheric perturbations of all kinds,
including rain, hail, thunder, lightning, harsh winters, and possibly airborne epi-
demic diseases. He wrote:

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