Page 83 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

effect of this technique: the loud bang produced by the exploding balloon. He
noted that a small bubble of oxy-hydrogen produces a report like a “horse-pistol,”
and recalled an occasion years before, when physicist Joseph Henry had deto-
nated 50 cubic feet of the mixture in a buried vessel, and the explosion tore a hole
in the ground 18 feet in diameter. Dyrenforth’s experiments with rackarock (an
explosive widely used in coal mining) and a 10-foot oxy-hydrogen balloon on
his country estate in Mount Pleasant, near the current National Zoological Park
in Washington, D.C., were witnessed by Secretary of the Smithsonian Samuel
P. Langley, John Wesley Powell of the U.S. Geological Survey, patent-holder
Daniel Ruggles, and other luminaries. Although Dyrenforth did not generate
rain that day, he did induce a letter of protest to the secretary of agriculture from
his neighbor William J. Rhees, chief clerk of the Smithsonian, who claimed the
blasts disturbed his fine herd of Jersey cows, shook his farmhouse, and alarmed
his family. Beyond the neighborhood upset, this exercise in backyard bombing,
with smoke billowing and flaming oxy-hydrogen balloons falling from the sky,
was dramatic, it attracted a large crowd of onlookers, and it was fun. It amounted
to the government’s declaration of war on both drought and boredom. 34
Nelson Morris, a prominent Chicago meatpacker who was said to own the
largest herd of Black Angus cattle in the world, offered his “C” Ranch near Mid-
land, Texas, as a site for the field trials. The ranch was located at 32º12'N, 102º20'W,
at an elevation of about 3,000 feet, in dry, hilly country just off the right-of-way
of the Texas and Pacific Railroad. Morris sweetened the offer with free room
and board for Dyrenforth’s team and payment of all local expenses. The site is
located on Ranch Road 1788, not far from the New Mexico towns of Alamogordo,
Socorro, and Roswell, if you get my drift and are looking for a day trip.
The advance party left Washington, D.C., on July 3, 1891, by train, carrying
suitcases, mortars, and 2 tons of cast-iron borings furnished by the navy for mak-
ing hydrogen. The full account is in Dyrenforth’s final report, but as recorded
more humorously by the Farm Implement News of Chicago, the party consisted
of half a dozen special scientists, “all of whom know a great deal, some of them
35
having become bald-headed in their earnest search for theoretical knowledge.”
Myers and Castellar were the balloonists; Rosell, the chemist; Curtis, the meteo-
rologist; and Draper, the electrician. In St. Louis, they added 8 tons of sulfuric
acid in drums, 5 additional tons of cast iron, 1 ton of chloride of potash, and 0.5
ton of manganese oxide, along with casks, balloons, and other supplies. once
they got to Texas, the railroad provided them free passage to Midland, where
they arrived on August 5. Waiting for them on the siding was a block of pure tin
rolled into thin sheets for making electrical kites and six kegs of blasting powder
donated by a local coal mine.

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