Storm Kings

by Lee Sandlin

  He was a masterful, electrifying speaker. “He showed remarkable power in explaining his ideas,” Bache remembered. “His simplicity and clearness enabled his hearers to follow him without too great effort, and the earnestness with which he spoke out his convictions carried them away in favor of his theory.” He also excelled at dramatic storytelling; he spent a lot of his time at the podium describing the weird appearance of the New Brunswick tornado and the catastrophic destruction it had caused. He was particularly adept at the give-and-take with audience members in open debates afterward. He was never fazed, never flummoxed, always courteous even with the rudest interlocutor.

  He grew used to the hostile question he inevitably got—even from polite and attentive audiences—after the spell of his tornado story wore off: What earthly difference did it make which theory of storms was the correct one? After a year on the lyceum circuit, he had worked out a startling answer.

  He always began by acknowledging the problem. At that time, the leading theories were his own theory of steam power and Redfield’s theory of whirlwinds, but which was the true one mattered only to natural philosophers. Nor would he offer that feeble old rationale that the answer was worth knowing merely for the abstract good of possessing knowledge. His audiences were practical people, and so he had a practical notion to offer them. Suppose, he said, that his theory of steam power had a great consequence, an almost unimaginable consequence. He was prepared to let his audience in on the secret. Steam power, he said, would allow mankind to control the weather.

  “Mankind for thousands of years has been vainly endeavoring to discover the laws which regulate the weather,” read his advertising poster for a lyceum appearance in Philadelphia. “Professor Espy (a native of Pennsylvania and a citizen of Philadelphia) has made the great discovery which mankind have been seeking ever since the flood, and is now giving a course of lectures on that subject, at the northeast corner of Eighth and Chestnut streets.” This was, he promised, the most significant scientific breakthrough of modern times—“not excepting the law of gravitation—Dr. Franklin’s discovery of atmospheric electricity—the cotton gin—the spinning jenny—or the application of the paddle-wheel to the steamboat.” With his theory firmly recognized and put into practice worldwide, people could cause rain to fall wherever they needed it. Canals and rivers would be navigable year-round; droughts would be a thing of the past. Most amazing of all, it would make a reality something that nobody had even imagined would be possible before: accurate weather prediction. “It will enable farmers, mechanics, manufacturers and travellers to anticipate the weather for a day or two, and sometimes for a longer period in advance.” The poster concluded, “Let those who doubt come to the lecture this evening and hear for themselves.”

  The essence of his theory, as he explained it, was simple. If a storm was caused by a rising column of hot air, then, logically, we should be able to create a storm whenever we wanted to by artificial means. All we had to do was create a huge source of heat, and this would cause rain to fall wherever we needed it. The simplest way of creating this heat was by building a fire.

  There was an obvious objection at this point: fires did not cause rain. Espy had an answer for that, too: they did, but we didn’t realize it. An ordinary fire might not result in observable rainfall, but a really big fire would. He had discovered several documented cases where cumulonimbus clouds had formed over volcanic eruptions. His conclusion was that an extremely intense, hot fire set in a region of severe drought would create a thunderstorm large enough to break the drought and restore normal weather.

  The idea struck many listeners—perhaps most—as sheer foolishness. The typical response was one he got from an editorialist at his hometown of Philadelphia: “The thing is too absurd for rational consideration.” He didn’t help his case with his exuberant, theatrical manner; as one newspaper noted, it all too obviously resembled “the charlatanry of a quack—a really scientific man never went to work in this way.” But Espy was imperturbable. He even published an open letter in Philadelphia conceding that the public ridicule of his proposal was “proper enough,” because he hadn’t had a chance to prove that it would work. That was a shrewd move. It forced some people to reconsider what he was saying. Quacks and cranks, some of the press observed, generally lacked the ability to laugh at themselves. “We surely wish him success,” one of the most openly derisory of the editorialists now wrote, “though we do smile sometimes at his enthusiasm.”

  By the end of the 1830s he had become one of the most popular and successful figures on the lyceum circuit. He sometimes found himself in direct competition with other lecturers: once in Boston, it was with the celebrated preacher William Miller, who had conclusively established from biblical prophecy that God would destroy the world on March 23, 1843. The joke went around that Miller was on one side of town announcing that God was about to burn down the world while Espy was on the other side arguing that people should do it themselves.

  But Espy knew he would need something fresh to keep the audiences coming. That was when he hit upon the idea of finding a regular debating partner to take the opposite side. He thought the logical candidate was William Redfield. He decided to coax Redfield into touring with him so that they could debate their respective theories at every stop on the circuit. He issued a series of public challenges to Redfield from the lyceum platforms, and he wrote more reviews ridiculing his theory of whirlwind storms.

  Redfield didn’t take the bait. Since his initial controversies with Espy, he had returned to his old life, which was dignified and prosperous enough for anyone. His steamboat company, the Swiftsure Line, had offices and a large warehouse on the New York City docks and a large fleet of boats, some of them extremely lavish, running on the rivers and canals of New York and New England. For relaxation he took long and strenuous camping trips; he’d participated in one expedition into the unexplored reaches of the Adirondacks, which had found the source of the Hudson River. He was a respected member of New York City society; he sat on the board of New York’s Lyceum of Natural History, which ultimately became the New York Academy of Sciences. Through the lyceum, he’d become acquainted with many of the leading figures in American science, including some of the experts in meteorology he’d avoided in New Brunswick. But even though his relations with them now were perfectly cordial, he’d take no part in their scientific debates. When he was asked about New Brunswick, he’d say that he was certain that Espy was wrong and the tornado was a whirlwind but he had no intention of publishing his views on the subject—a remark that caused several of his new friends to chide him for being “unphilosophical.”

  But while Redfield left Espy’s taunts and challenges unanswered, somebody else accepted the challenge: Redfield’s old mentor Denison Olmsted. He agreed to a single debate, which was held at the Mercantile Library in New York City. The event drew a big crowd and a lot of press coverage. The two men were in fine form. Espy played the noble, commonsensical man of the people standing up to the hidebound professor; Olmsted was the distinguished authority who was going to teach an impertinent upstart his manners. They clashed and tussled over Espy’s steam power and his ideas about artificial rain; they even squabbled about Olmsted’s theories of the formation of hailstones and the origin of comets and shooting stars: Olmsted believed that comets had an extraterrestrial origin; Espy thought that was absurd and that they were obviously optical tricks caused by humidity in the lower atmosphere.

  Espy gradually got the upper hand. Olmsted, even after his years in a university lecture hall, simply wasn’t as skilled a public performer. Espy later described Olmsted’s manner as “sneering.” Toward the end, after an hour of Espy’s relentless goading, Olmsted made the fatal mistake of losing his temper. He said, as Espy remembered it, that “I had failed to convince men of science of the truth of my theory, and that I had appealed to the people, who were incapable of judging.”

  That settled the debate as far as the audience was concerned. The next day the New
York City newspapers were unanimous in proclaiming Espy the winner. From then on he was regarded in the press as a major authority on American science. That was when he acquired a nickname: wherever he went, reporters covering his appearances called him the Storm King.

  Espy’s celebrity gradually drew the whole of the meteorological community into the question about the nature of tornadoes. Everybody felt obliged to take a side—either with Espy, that a tornado was a swiftly rising column of air, or with Redfield, that it was a whirlwind on the ground. In 1840 the general consensus was probably still with Espy. But his support was growing shaky; the problem was his theory of rainmaking, which was making it increasingly impossible for his partisans to discuss the idea of steam power objectively. Joseph Henry, the professor of natural philosophy at Princeton, politely said that Espy’s public posturing and feuding were increasingly displaying “a want of prudence.” Alexander Bache admitted a kind of sorrowful concern over “the strange direction my friend’s career is taking.” Robert Hare wrote an essay for the National Gazette saying that Espy’s theories about storms and rainmaking were “demonstrably incorrect” and his ceaseless propagandizing for them was “a perversion of the public mind.”

  Meanwhile, Espy had at last managed to goad Redfield into publishing angry rebuttals to his attacks. But he seems never to have realized just how much Redfield had come to despise him. Redfield saved his real venom for his letters to his friends. There he denounced Espy as a fraud. Espy was no longer even pretending to do serious science; he was merely saying whatever came into his head to draw more fame to himself. His new career, Redfield wrote, was only about his “yearning for immortality.” At the same time, Redfield couldn’t help following Espy’s career obsessively; he noted with great satisfaction every time there was a news report of an Espy lecture that was poorly attended. Favorable news coverage, on the other hand, was simply proof of how skilled Espy had become at manipulating the press. “In order to account for the present tone of our newspaper press relating to him,” Redfield wrote in one letter, “you must understand that he lays regular siege to the corps editorial, and plies them with as many of his puffing missives as their credulity or good nature will endure.”

  By then Espy’s tornado lectures were also becoming sufficiently famous to draw public criticism from another, wholly unexpected quarter: the growing number of tornado survivors and eyewitnesses. There was near-universal agreement among them that the distinguishing quality of a tornado was its violent rotation, and they were angered to hear such a prominent figure as Espy so blithely dismiss the evidence of their own eyes as mistaken. One of the strongest denunciations came from Professor Lewis Beck, the man who had watched the New Brunswick tornado of 1835 from the deck of the steamboat Napoleon. Beck wrote a long paper for the American Journal of Science in 1839 describing his experiences that day. He presented it as a personal memoir; its real purpose was a point-blank attack on Espy’s analysis of the storm. He granted that Espy was right about one thing: the tornado funnel was an ascending column of air. “The upward movement,” he wrote, “was distinctly visible at a distance.” But the rest of Espy’s ideas were absurdly wrong. The funnel had absolutely and indisputably displayed a strong, swift, and continuous rotation. In fact, Beck believed it was precisely the spiraling winds that had done all the damage: “There was also undoubtedly a whirling motion, to which the destruction produced by the tornado is to be chiefly ascribed. This motion, as I have already said, appeared to us from on board the Napoleon, to succeed the upward movement and characterized the progress of the tornado until it passed from our view. That the tornado possessed this whirling character, was also abundantly demonstrated by the appearances presented in New Brunswick and its vicinity.”

  Beck’s conclusion was unequivocal. “I must confess,” he wrote, “that I was greatly surprised when I saw it subsequently stated that there was no evidence of a whirling motion … I am constrained to believe that had the facts been carefully examined without reference to a previously adopted theory, such an inference would not have been drawn from them.” In other words, Espy was so in love with his theory of steam power that he was deliberately suppressing or falsifying evidence that didn’t fit.

  Espy didn’t respond to Beck directly. But a clue to his attitude around that time was caught by a physician and university professor named Usher Parsons. Parsons happened to accompany Espy on a tour of a tornado damage track in New Jersey. Parsons raised the question of why so many eyewitnesses described the tornado as spinning. Espy shrugged. He said he had originally believed that all those eyewitness reports were mistaken; now he had heard so many of them that he supposed they were true. But according to Parsons, Espy “attaches less importance to the gyratory motion than Redfield and others have done, and believes it to be accidental.” All that mattered to Espy about the tornado was the mechanism of steam power; the rotation of the funnel was a minor detail.

  In 1838, at the annual meeting of the new British Association for the Advancement of Science, there was a public debate on the nature of tornadoes. Espy’s steam-power theory was defended by his friend Alexander Bache, who happened to be traveling in Europe that season; Redfield was championed by a British admirer, Lieutenant Colonel William Reid of the British Engineering Service. The two men met in a furious intellectual clash before a packed house. In attendance was the most celebrated man of science in England, the astronomer Sir John Herschel. Herschel, like most of the audience, ended up favoring Redfield and Reid. Herschel said in the public discussion that he couldn’t see how Espy’s theory could work: the tornado vortex would require an area of low pressure inside the funnel to create suction, but the straight-line inflowing winds imagined by Espy would make the pressure in the funnel higher than the surrounding air. Herschel went on to say, though, that whichever view was correct, he’d found the debate profoundly illuminating. It had even given him a strange and radically new idea about one of the deepest mysteries of his own field: the nature of sunspots. What if, he asked the startled audience, sunspots were really tornadoes—unimaginably vast tornadoes, tornadoes larger than the earth itself? On that dizzying note the discussion ended. Redfield’s and Espy’s two champions then shook hands; Bache even complimented Reid for being so unselfish an advocate for an American scientist, an unusual act for a Briton in those days. They parted friends. They were like seconds at a duel who wouldn’t allow the dispute between their principals to get in the way of their own sense of courtesy.

  The news of the debate soon made its way back to America. When Espy heard about it, he was incensed. Herschel’s objections particularly galled him; he was certain that if he had only been there, he could have shown Herschel how he was mistaken. He was determined to correct this injustice at the earliest opportunity—which is how, two years later, he was himself in England, to present his views at that year’s meeting of the BAAS.

  It was held in Glasgow that year; more than a thousand people attended. Most of the prominent scientists of Britain were there—almost all of them, in fact, but John Herschel, who (to Espy’s bitter disappointment) had decided to skip that meeting. Espy began his lecture with a clever hook he’d invented in his years on the lyceum circuit: when speaking in a strange town, he’d bone up beforehand on some famous local storm that everybody in the audience was likely to remember, and he would discuss it in so much detail he might have been an eyewitness; then he would proceed to show how it was a perfect demonstration of his theory. For the BAAS, he picked a violent gale that had cut across Great Britain the previous year. He put up a large map of the British Isles on which he’d drawn arrows indicating the prevailing winds during the gale and showed how they all converged in straight lines at the storm’s center. From there he went on to the views of Redfield. He had prepared diagrams of several hurricanes Redfield had described, and showed that in each case the winds had not displayed any rotation but had all blown inward in straight lines. Then he went on to speak in great technical detail of his theory. He descr
ibed the process of caloric rarefaction, and he illustrated it with a detailed demonstration of his nepheloscope (which he’d brought with him from America). His talk was a long one, but he meant it to be long; he was always certain that if only he was given sufficient time, he could win over any audience. It was with the greatest reluctance, with the creeping feeling that his triumph was still slightly out of reach, that he at last opened up the floor to debate.

  The questions came at him fast, and few of them were friendly. Was he aware that the numbers for his theory of caloric rarefaction didn’t add up? Weren’t the patterns of fallen trees he had mapped too haphazard for the conclusions he wanted to draw from them? Why hadn’t Espy considered the possibility that the tornado’s rotation was caused by the centrifugal force of the inflowing winds? The objections grew more detailed and technical. “The small funnel at the centre of the tornado, through which Mr. Espy supposed the air to rise, would be insufficient to vent all the air which would rush during a tornado, with the frightful velocity we know it to attain.” “All the vapor in the air would be condensed into cloud much sooner than Mr. Espy supposed … the violent ascending vortex calculated upon by Mr. Espy would not exist.”

  Espy was taken aback by the barrage. He argued back heatedly but ineffectually. It was a rare thing for him to be at a loss in a public forum, but the truth was that at the lyceums he’d mostly been debating people who didn’t know that much about science; he was out of the habit of responding to detailed and substantial criticisms of his ideas. So he simply tried to talk the objections down without refuting them, and then he would explain himself over again more patiently. He answered all the questioners “at considerable length,” one observer wrote: “Mr. Espy seemed to think that he had been misunderstood.”