Page 79 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

from the Pacific ocean. Analogous to drilling for groundwater, aerial explosions
would merely release the moisture that was already up there, traveling overhead.
Seven decades later, this “river of air” would be called the jet stream and would be
deemed important not for its moisture, since it is absolutely desiccated, but for
its dynamic effects on high-flying aircraft and on surface weather.
When critics pointed out that loud concussions, if effective, should cause it
to rain immediately, not hours or days later, Powers fell back on his two-current
theory: “The center of the atmospheric disturbance caused by a battle should
remain in the vicinity of the battlefield while the two currents are mixing
together and initiating the process that leads to rain—a process which, it is plain,
must require time in reaching a state of effective action.” However deficient in
26
meteorological details, Powers’s theory was appealing to desperate farmers, like
those in New England at the time, since it directed their hopeful gaze aloft, away
from their parched fields and devastated crops. Powers reminded them that there
is an ocean of moisture derived not from surface evaporation but from the Pacific
ocean and just waiting to be tapped. However, one observer noted that no effect
on the weather had been perceived in the Rocky Mountains after years of blast-
ing for mining and road-building operations. 27
Powers sought support for his theory from the U.S. Army Signal office
weather service and through his representative, Charles Farwell (R-Illinois), who
championed this cause for the next two decades. After reviewing Powers’s theory
and his proposal to fire three hundred cannon arranged in a circle a mile across,
the House Committee on Agriculture concluded in a report that the govern-
ment should act unilaterally on this issue of great significance and support Pow-
ers’s field experiments: “We have the powder, and we have the guns, and the men
to serve them, and we ought not to leave to other nations and to after-ages the
task of solving the great question as to whether the control of the weather is not,
to a useful extent, within the reach of man.” In another proposal, Powers sug-
28
gested employing the siege guns at the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois for rain-
making experiments at a cost, per rainstorm, of $21,000, an amount he claimed
was much less expensive than the cost of irrigation or the loss of crops due to lack
of rain, but an amount that could outfit more than a score of family farms. The
proposals were not funded.
Powers finally found an ally in Daniel Ruggles of Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Ruggles was a West Point graduate, a former general in the Confederate Army,
and the owner of a ranch in Rio Bravo, Texas, who received a patent in 1880 “for
producing rain fall . . . by conveying and exploding torpedoes or other explosive
29
agents within the cloud realm.” Ruggles’s “invention” consisted, in brief, of a
balloon carrying torpedoes and cartridges charged with such explosives as nitro-

62 | rain makerS