Page 98 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

The practice of firing storm cannon apparently spread from sea to land. An
entry on orage by Louis de Jaucourt in the famous French Encyclopédie of 1750
states that the dissipation of storms by the noise of cannon “does not seem out
of all probability” and may be worth the cost of an experiment. By 1769 a retired
French naval officer, the Marquis de Chevriers, had set up his battery in France to
fight against strong hail and damaging storms. Ever the empiricist, Arago exam-
ined the weather records of the Paris observatory, where, within earshot, regular
gun practice took place for more than twenty years at a nearby fort. He found
no effect of the cannonading on dissipating the clouds (214–218). By the middle
of the nineteenth century, however, the opposite opinion—that the concussions
of great explosions might make it rain—had garnered renewed public attention,
but certainly not acceptance, through the work of Charles Le Maout, Edward
Powers, Daniel Ruggles, and Robert Dyrenforth.

Hagelschiessen

For centuries, farmers in Austria shot consecrated guns at storms in attempts to
dispel them. Some guns were loaded with nails, ostensibly to kill the witches rid-
ing in the clouds; others were fired with powder alone through open empty bar-
rels to make a great noise—perhaps, some said, to disrupt the electrical balance
of the storm. In 1896 Albert Stiger, a vine grower in southeastern Austria and
burgomaster of Windisch-Feistritz, revived the ancient tradition of hagelschies-
sen (hail shooting)—basically declaring “war on the clouds” by firing cannon
7
when storms threatened. Faced with mounting losses from summer hailstorms
that threatened his grapes, he attempted to disrupt, with mortar fire, the “calm
before the storm,” or what he observed as a strange stillness in the air moments
before the onset of heavy summer precipitation.
Stiger gained notoriety on his first attempt. A gentle rain in his valley report-
edly accompanied his shooting on June 4, 1896, with damaging hail falling
elsewhere. He experienced a very militant summer, shooting at the clouds on
forty different occasions. His hail cannon were constructed from 12-inch iron
mortars (or pipes) and were loaded with a quarter pound of black powder; but
some of them burst upon firing. Their replacements were made of steel with fun-
nel-shaped chimneys taken from the smokestacks of worn-out railway engines,
which the state provided to Stiger and others free of charge. The devices resem-
bled megaphones pointed vertically and were installed on strong bases made of
oak, some with wheels for towing. Later models had a steel ring welded inside

rain fakerS | 81