Storm Kings

by Lee Sandlin

  Espy was left crushed. He was enough of an objective judge of his performances to know that this had been a disaster. He also knew that he was going to have to do something very dramatic very quickly to repair his reputation. He’d booked an extended lecture tour through the British Isles that summer and fall, but in the wake of Glasgow he abruptly canceled his remaining dates. Instead, he left for Paris, where he would try presenting his theory to the French Academy of Sciences.

  It was a bold move, but a shrewd one: French intellectuals in those years were known to be much more hospitable to Americans than the British traditionally were. The academy did agree to hear him out. A panel of respected natural philosophers listened to him courteously as he explained his views at great length. When he was finished, they congratulated him on the originality of his ideas. They promised to consider them in depth and issue a statement. But they made no promises about when.

  By then the news of the Glasgow meeting had reached America; several newspapers had reported that he’d been thoroughly humiliated. That, together with the growing disdain of the American scientific community, induced in him a sudden wave of despair—maybe even of self-doubt. He simply couldn’t see any point in going back to America with nothing to show for his trip. So he decided to stay on. He spent the rest of that autumn, and the whole of a clammy Parisian winter, waiting for word from the French Academy of Sciences.

  It took the academy six months to issue its report. But when Espy at last received a copy, he was elated. The panel members had concluded that Espy’s theory of steam power was convincing and that caloric rarefaction must be the correct mechanism for the creation of thunderstorms. They also accepted his description of straight-line movement in tornadoes and dismissed Redfield’s whirlwinds: “Mr. Espy’s theory, which is based upon facts, refutes the idea of a whirling motion of the air in the tornado.” They had only one demur: they believed that Espy didn’t give sufficient weight to the influence of atmospheric electricity on tornadoes. (This was in fact a general bias in the thinking of French meteorologists of the time.) They told Espy that he needed to include more about “the action of electricity.” Then, they concluded, his theory “will leave nothing to be desired.”

  The report included a recommendation: “Mr. Espy should be placed by the government of the United States in a position to continue his important investigations and to complete his theory.” They considered this to be particularly important given that America was, “as it were, the home of these fearful meteors.”

  Espy thanked the members of the panel graciously for their helpful suggestions. He promised them that he would think over the question of the relationship between tornadoes and lightning, and immediately forgot all about it.

  Espy returned to America in the late spring of 1841. The news of his great triumph in Paris had preceded him. This was at a time when many Americans still acutely felt their cultural inferiority to the Europeans; an American scientist winning the approval of the French academy was a major event. He found his new lectures enormously well attended and the press coverage rapturous. He immediately decided to put together a book to cash in on his fame. He called it The Philosophy of Storms. It was a hasty piece of work: a jumble of his old drafts and papers, plus a stop-the-presses account of his adventures in Glasgow and Paris. But it sold very well and solidified his fame. It also earned him his most distinguished and objective praise, from the celebrated mathematician Benjamin Peirce, who wrote a long notice for The Yale Review. It wasn’t an unqualified rave; Peirce began by mocking Espy’s public persona in debate:

  I shall attempt to examine Professor Espy’s theory in a spirit of perfect candor and impartiality, but, I fear, without success; for there is an air of self-satisfaction and contempt for the views of other observers in his statements, which irresistibly arouses the demon of obstinacy. Even storm-kings are intolerable in a republic; and not the “infinite utility” of this new theory, nor the singular modesty with which its author affects to be merely the Newton of Meteorology, can lull the hardened democrat into submission to the tyranny with which he acts the sole monarch of the winds, the veritable cloud-compeller, the modern Zeus nepheligepetis, and treats other observers as invaders of his domains. [Nepheligepetis is classical Greek for “begetter of clouds.”]

  But about the theory of steam power, Peirce was generous in his praise. He did note, as others had done, that the mathematics of caloric rarefaction didn’t add up, but he didn’t consider this a fatal flaw; the data could have been sloppily collected or incorrectly analyzed (both of these things were in fact true). What mattered was the elegance and explanatory power of the theory itself. “Its simplicity attracts and delights,” Peirce wrote, “and it seems to be demonstrated at a glance, by the most direct and necessary connexion of cause and effect … This beautiful mechanism, whether it has been adopted by Nature or not, is most worthy of her; and Mr. Espy may honorably be proud of its conception.”

  Back on the lyceum circuit, Espy found his celebrity status solidly in place. He was introduced to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who recorded in his journal that Espy “amused me with storms and metaphysics.” A widely read satire on current American celebrities included “Professor Espy … with a tremendous storm in a gum-elasticbag”; the author was Nathaniel Hawthorne. The popular Godey’s Lady’s Book ran a story called “The Rain King,” set in Philadelphia a century in the future, when “the theory of a certain ingenious and highly scientific philosopher, who flourished towards the middle of the nineteenth century, had now been brought to practical perfection.” The story described a procession of citizens petitioning the Rain King for their own favorite weather: children wanted school rained out, a woman required fair skies so she could flee her husband, umbrella makers demanded unexpected downpours, and parasol makers paid for permanent sunshine. “With the agency of steam power,” the author explained, rain could now be generated on demand; the artificial clouds had turned out to be just as good as real ones, “except that they could not promise to rain frogs.”

  6

  Under the Map

  Robert Hare’s laboratory was as elaborate and mysterious as an alchemist’s den. It took up most of a wing at the University of Pennsylvania. There was an enormous hearth and a forge room. There were two fireproof workrooms with groined arches. There was an enclosed study above a scullery; the scullery had sinks and a large boiler and river water piped in from the city’s public works. There was an air furnace, and evaporating ovens, and several sand baths, and an alembic. The walls were heavily bricked and reinforced in case one of his large electrical experiments went wrong, and there was an elaborate ventilation system with a flue and fifteen vents, because the experiments, even when they worked perfectly, were so often toxic.

  Prominently displayed around the main room were the famous inventions of Hare’s early days—the oxyhydrogen blowpipe, the deflagrator, the electrical plating machine. All manner of gear testified to work in progress: piping, tubing, plates, and rods. The stone pillars of the room were wound up in yard after yard of copper wire as though they were cocooned—Hare wouldn’t explain why. At the far end of the room were rows of wooden seats on risers, where his students would sit for his lectures. He was a ferocious lecturer. He had written a standard handbook on electricity and electrical research, and he expected his students to know it by heart. He also expected them to ignore any book on chemistry by another hand. Hare had had fallings-out with almost all of his colleagues, either because he considered them idiots or because he was convinced they had stolen his ideas. If any student had the gall to mention work by any other chemist—up to and including the greatest chemist of that era, Michael Faraday—he would be met with an incinerating glare of hate, and sometimes permanent banishment from his lectures.

  Many people blamed Hare’s perpetual foul mood on his lack of progress in his work. Hare’s major inventions had all been made when he was young; his current work consisted of refinements to the devices for electrical heating and electrop
lating that he’d first constructed decades earlier. He was always extremely touchy about his professional standing. He was driven to a rage whenever he felt as though his achievements were not being given proper acknowledgment. His professional correspondence was filled with fantastic tirades directed at the leading scientists of the age, because in Hare’s view they were all hacks, incompetents, thieves, or intellectual swindlers. One colleague said that it was dangerous to write to Hare about anything personal, because he would immediately publish it together with a furious point-by-point refutation.

  Part of the reason his progress had stalled is that his worldview had never budged from his earliest days. His ideas about the physical universe were essentially those of an earlier generation—Benjamin Franklin’s generation, in fact. He still believed in the theory of subtle fluids. The new theory that heat was the product of molecular motion he dismissed as pernicious nonsense. He thought the only problem with Franklin’s original work on electricity was that it hadn’t pushed the idea of the subtle fluid far enough. Hare believed that all the strange phenomena of the atmosphere, from comets to tornadoes, were really forms or by-products of lightning.

  It happened that he had witnessed a tornado in Philadelphia in 1840 and had written up a report of his own perceptions of it for the Franklin Institute’s journal. He could not see any evidence of a whirlwind; on the other hand, he said, he “could not reconcile the relative situation of the clouds, or their evident reaction and diversity of movement, with the theory of Mr. Espy.” In the tornado funnel, he wrote, he “had distinguished two clouds, one much above the other, between which there appeared to be an electrical reaction, tending to keep them at a distance.” He concluded that “this could not but demonstrate that electricity was the principal agent in the production of such phenomena.”

  Through all those years of controversy, Hare and Espy had managed to remain friends—at least until Espy’s endorsement by the French academy. This was a particularly galling blow to Hare. He considered it a betrayal—not so much by Espy as by the members of the academy. He had himself appeared before them a few years earlier, and they had been extremely enthusiastic about his electrical theories. He was not mollified to learn of the committee’s advice to Espy that he needed to reconsider the importance of electricity to his model of tornadoes. That seemed to him to be a fig leaf covering up a despicable intellectual compromise.

  Ordinarily, he would have fired off a volley of furious letters to both Espy and the academy. But this time he had a more cunning idea. He wrote to William Redfield instead and expressed his sympathy over how the academy had slighted Redfield’s whirlwind model. He suggested that Redfield complain to the academy about this injustice.

  Redfield obliged; by then he was enraged whenever anything good happened to Espy. But not one of his letters was answered. That was only what he had expected. He was thoroughly disenchanted with the scientific establishments of America and Europe for tolerating such an obvious charlatan as Espy. He was content to let the matter drop.

  But that didn’t prove to be so simple. When Hare realized that Redfield wasn’t going to keep pressing the case against Espy, he flew into one of the largest, most rancorous, most extravagant rages of his life. From then on, he was certain that Espy wasn’t the real enemy; Redfield was. What followed was the greatest sustained barrage of printed matter in the whole long controversy. Hare wrote pamphlet after pamphlet over the next few years, including Objections to Mr. Redfield’s Theory of Storms, Additional Objections to Redfield’s Theory of Storms, Further Objections and Strictures. Their tone never varied. A surface of brittle courtesy covered over a seethe of sarcasm, building each time to a triumphant, haughty, absolute dismissal. Redfield was a buffoon dispensing self-evident nonsense: Redfield’s idea of rotating storms was a physical impossibility, and all the evidence that Redfield had collected was meaningless tripe.

  Once again, under the savage goading of public criticism, Redfield roused himself for a counter-barrage. He dismissed Hare’s criticisms wholesale. Hare had no “reliable facts and observations” to offer in opposition to what Redfield described as “the established character of storms.” And if Hare absolutely required a theory, there were any number of possibilities. The rotation of storms could be the result of gravity, of the rotation of the earth, or of a natural tendency of water and wind to form spirals. These ideas were so obvious that Redfield didn’t see why the scientific community was so reluctant to accept them. But then, he thought that “the whole modern meteorological school,” from John Herschel on down, had fallen into what he called “a grand error,” by allowing itself to be seduced by the absurd theorizing of the likes of Espy and Hare.

  Hare’s counter-counter-replies duly followed. The notion that the rotation of storms, even granting it existed, could have anything to do with the rotation of the earth was the most preposterous idea he’d ever heard. Didn’t Redfield realize that as the earth turned, the atmosphere turned with it, and therefore the net effect would logically be zero? If Hare himself, along with the rest of the scientific community, rejected such absurdities, it was with good reason. Redfield knew nothing about science and had no business proposing his ideas in the first place. “I cannot give to this alleged theory the smallest importance,” Hare wrote; the scientific principles it relied on “exist only in the imagination of the author.”

  Redfield was so stung by Hare’s onslaught that he was moved to something like humor. In his next reply he asked why, if his ideas were so worthless, Hare was taking so many pains to refute them. Hare’s reply ricocheted back: the issue was the sinister fact of Redfield’s growing influence. “I admit,” Hare wrote, “that his essays have met with an attention which may have justified him in pluming himself on their success.” But that was the danger: “Some men of science of the present time are prone to lend a favorable ear to any hypothesis, however in itself absurd, provided it be associated with observations.”

  Redfield replied to that pamphlet, too, of course, and the one after, but exhaustion had finally set in. He told a friend that he never would have replied in the first place if he’d known Hare better. Hare was, he said, the sort of man who simply went on arguing until he was the last one left.

  In the 1840s, the capital of the country—it was then known as Washington City—was still more of an idea than a real place. The great stone constructions like the Washington Monument and the Capitol Dome were unfinished; the existing government buildings were scattered along a maze of mud tracks; the street grid was cut through by a half-finished canal that overflowed with sewage. It had a reputation for being little more than a disease-ridden swamp—not unlike its reputation as a seat of power. But it was still the only practical option Espy had left, if he was going to be America’s meteorologist.

  He had already approached the Pennsylvania legislature for a grant to mount a pilot program in weather control. He’d even managed to get the idea heard by the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. But the result had been a fiasco. The debate had quickly degenerated into whimsy. Speaker after speaker took turns indulging in mock-alarmist oratory denouncing the idea of allowing any one man to control the weather. Think of the power he’d have over the state economy, to say nothing of his political clout; they all agreed this would be a calamity for Pennsylvania, and they unanimously voted the proposal down.

  Espy was undaunted. He went to Washington City and paid a call on the U.S. House of Representatives. In January 1842 he met with John Quincy Adams. Adams was an influential man. But more important for Espy’s purpose, he was known to be an eccentric man, with a tolerance for unusual ideas. He had even at one point endorsed the theories of a strange itinerant lecturer named John Cleves Symmes, who believed the earth was hollow and that the interior could be accessed at the North Pole. During his presidency, Adams had been prepared to back an expedition to search for the polar entrance and make contact with the interior’s inhabitants, but he’d left office and returned to Congress before the expedition
could be mounted.

  Adams proved to be far less hospitable to Espy’s ideas. “Mr. Espy, the storm-breeder,” Adams wrote in his diary, “left me with a paper exposing his three wishes of appropriations by Congress for his benefit—about as rational as those of Hans Carvel and his wife.” (This was a reference to a dirty story in Rabelais: Carvel has a dream in which he begs the devil to make his wife faithful; the devil shows him a ring and tells him that his wife can never betray him while he wears it; he wakes to find his hand between his wife’s legs while his wife is telling him to pull out his finger.) “The man is methodically monomaniac,” Adams wrote, “and the dimensions of his organ of self-esteem have been swollen to the size of a goitre by a report from a committee of the National Institute of France, endorsing all his crack-brained discoveries in meteorology. I told him, with all possible civility, that it would be of no use to memorialize the House of Representatives in behalf of his three wishes.”

  But Espy wasn’t done. In fact, he explained, a memo from Adams to the House wouldn’t serve at all. He had a grander goal: he wanted to address the Senate. He knew that he could sway its members to his cause just as he had the French academy. Adams wrote that Espy asked him “if they should pass a bill in his favor, whether I would support it in the House. I said if the Senate should pass such a bill I would do all that I could for him in the House.”

  Then he excused himself from further discussion, pleading urgent House business.

  At that time, Adams and the rest of Congress did happen to be contending with a particularly complex piece of business. A British scientist and investor named James Smithson, inspired by the ideals of the American Revolution, had willed his considerable estate to the people of the United States, with the direction that the money be used to fund an establishment “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” Adams sat on a House select committee that was trying to decide what to do with this bequest. The committee members had been arguing about it for several years and still hadn’t arrived at a plan.