Page 88 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

measurements, you can usually convince the eyewitnesses of your efficacy and, in
turn, claim credit for any rain that does fall nearby.
The media had a field day with Dyrenforth’s experiments. The Nation criti-
cized the government for wasting tax dollars, observing that the effect of the
explosion of a 10-foot hydrogen balloon on aerial currents would be less than
“the effect of the jump of one vigorous flea upon a thousand-ton steamship run-
ning at a speed of twenty knots.” Scientific American pointed out that after the
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rainmakers had telegraphed from Texas to all parts of the country announcing
the wonderful success of their bombs, it was discovered that the meteorological
records for that locality had indicated probabilities for rain for a day or two in
advance of the firing, and that the rain would have fallen all the same without
any burning of powder or sending up of balloons. The article was accompanied
by an illustration of traditional rainmaking in India and the cutting remark that
there “seems to be little doubt that the swinging of a Hindoo head downward
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is just as effective for producing rain as the making of loud noises.” The Farm
Implement News published a satirical cartoon of Dyrenforth and his team in
action (figure 2.2).
F. W. Clarke’s humorous “An ode to Pluviculture; or, The Rhyme of the Rain
Machine,” published in Life in 1891, was undoubtedly inspired by Dyrenforth’s
experiments. In the poem, the hapless farmer, Jeremy Jonathan Joseph Jones,
seeks to break a drought using

cannon, and mortars, and lots of shells,
And dynamite by the ton;
With a gas balloon and a chime of bells
And various other mystic spells
To overcloud the sun.

His third shot into a cloudless sky “brought a heavy dew”; his fourth, tornadoes,
“thunder, rain and hail.” Jeremy drowned in the ensuing flood, and his farm is now
a lake. All efforts to stop the deluge were in vain,

Until the Bureau at Washington stirred,
And stopped the storm with a single word,
By just predicting—Rain! 43

Curtis, the meteorologist on the Dyrenforth expedition, ended his official
report on a sour note: “These experiments have not afforded any scientific stand-
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ing to the theory that rain-storms can be produced by concussions.” He thought

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