Page 91 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

one of the more colorful ideas for bringing down the rain at the time came
from G. H. Bell of New York in 1880. He proposed building a series of hollow
towers 1,500 feet high—one set of towers to blow saturated air up to cooler air
and have the moisture condensed into rain, the other set to suck in rain clouds
and store them for use as needed. The inventor considered that the same system
could be used to prevent rain by reversing the blower so that the descending air
might “annihilate” the clouds. 50
other explosive ideas were in the air as well. A weather patent to destroy or
disrupt tornadoes was filed by J. B. Atwater in 1887. His device consisted of dyna-
mite charges with blasting caps installed on poles and situated a mile or so south-
west of a settlement. A tornado crossing the elevated minefield was supposed to
detonate the explosives with its high winds and flying debris, hopefully disrupt-
ing its circulation and protecting the town. With the likelihood of a given area
being visited by tornadoes rare and their recurrence even more rare, the installa-
tion of minefields, even elevated ones, never caught on—fortunately so for the
generation of children then playing in the fields. 51
The most improbable invention, however, belongs to Laurice Leroy Brown
of Patmos, Kansas, who filed a patent application in 1892 for an “automatic
transporter and exploder for explosives aiding rain-fall” (figure 2.3). The device
was basically a large tower (A) with a sloping wire (B) connected to a bat-
tery (C ) on which an operator can hang a stick of dynamite (D) on a pulley (E)
and have it roll along a track until it completes an electrical circuit through
a wire (F ) and point (G ) at the end of the track (H ). The completed electric
circuit was intended to ignite the dynamite and set off shock waves to stim-
ulate rainfall, according to the ideas published by Edward Powers. Although
erecting, and especially operating, such a device would certainly be a welcome
diversion on the Kansas plains, possible design flaws include the danger to the
operator of climbing a high metal tower with sticks of dynamite during an elec-
trical storm and the apparent certainty that the first detonation of explosives at
the end of the track would completely destroy the apparatus at the base of the
sloping wire. 52

* * * * *

In the nineteenth century, the scientific rain kings—James Espy, Charles Le
Maout, Edward Powers, Daniel Ruggles, and Robert Dyrenforth—were altru-
istic monomaniacs who based their vision of a prosperous and healthy world
order on the ultimate control of a single weather variable: precipitation. Grasp-
ing at scientific straws while posing as masters of an esoteric aerial realm, they

74 | rain makerS