Page 81 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

science—no, none of these grand revelations of occult science were available to
him. They had then [in Espy’s day] scarcely dawned upon the horizon of the human
mind. (13)

Wrapping up his argument, which was by now a secular sermon, with themes
borrowed from the march of progress and the pulpit, Ruggles claimed that his
technique might alleviate human suffering both in the United States and around
the world:

The conformation of our continent, crowned with lofty mountain ranges, its
great bounding rivers, its broad fertile plains, and its boundless forests—all swept
by the rain-clouds of surrounding oceans—all, all give assurance that a combina-
tion of skill and industry will materially protect our soil from impending drought,
and from those visitations of desolating famine so often chronicled in the eastern
world. . . . [If this plan works,] no other scheme of philanthropy known to man—
save that embodied in the Christian dispensation—transcends it! (17–18)

Describing his scheme as an “advanced step” in the science of “meteorological
engineering,” Ruggles appealed, unsuccessfully, to the U.S. Senate Committee
on Agriculture for $10,000 in support of his rainmaking experiments. A Civil
War veteran who had witnessed major battles with no rain at all wrote in a let-
ter to Scientific American that if cannon explosions in a battle do not cause rain,
Ruggles’s patent balloon will not do it either. An editorial writer opined, “We
31
do not think the invention is worth a cent or the patent either.” 32

a Perfect imitation of battle

Robert St. George Dyrenforth (1844–1910), a controversial and flamboyant
patent lawyer from Washington, D.C., was certain that rain could be caused by
explosions in midair. He read whatever he could about rainmaking, including Le
Maout’s pamphlets from France and the second edition of Powers’s book, pub-
lished in 1890, and consulted with meteorologist John P. Finley of the Signal Ser-
vice and many others. During a severe and prolonged western drought, Charles
Farwell, now a U.S. senator, succeeded in obtaining appropriations of $9,000
for the support of a new series of field experiments on rainmaking by concus-
sion. He recommended that Secretary of Agriculture Jeremiah Rusk be placed in
charge of the project. The newly formed U.S. Weather Bureau, also under Rusk’s
supervision, was quite skeptical of rainmaking by concussion, and the chief of

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