Storm Kings

by Lee Sandlin

  Redfield refused to say anything in response to Hare. Espy likewise remained silent. When it came time for Espy to give his scheduled lecture, the whole audience was expecting one of his most dazzling extempore flights of denunciatory and self-dramatizing rhetoric. But Espy simply read his prepared remarks on the technical difficulties of calibrating barometers and left the hall without another word.

  Back in Washington City, Espy and Joseph Henry had a large cloth map of the Republic hung in the main hall of the Smithsonian’s new building. Each day Espy compiled the latest weather information from his spotters network and had the major cities and towns on the map marked with their current conditions. It almost immediately became a landmark. All over Washington City, people would say casually to each other, “Let’s meet under the map.” Many visitors read a political message into it: its daily display of information from all over the country was a symbol of the way America was growing from a scattering of isolated communities into a single interconnected nation. Students of meteorology were impressed to see, each day, proof of a truth first put forward by Benjamin Franklin: that weather systems in America weren’t random, but moved in grand sweeps from southwest to northeast. Others simply liked to come by each day and watch the information change. Even if they couldn’t have explained why, they found a curious sort of satisfaction in knowing that yesterday it had rained in Charlotte, North Carolina, and today it was sunny.

  7

  One Dead, One Exhausted, One Converted

  In his last years, whenever James Espy considered—as he often did—the question of where things had gone irretrievably wrong for him, he would go back to 1850, when his wife passed away. His friends agreed: he was never the same after he lost Margaret. Alexander Bache wrote: “Mrs. Espy’s mind was essentially literary, and she could not aid her husband in his scientific inquiries or experiments; her health was delicate, and she could not assist him in his outdoor observations; but she supplied what was of more importance than these aids—a genial and loving interest ever manifested in his pursuits and successes, and in his very failures.”

  His personal loss was shortly followed by a professional defeat. Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian had been growing increasingly concerned about the rainmaking project. He wanted the ongoing support of Congress and the public, but the fantastic nature of the scheme, and Espy’s increasingly grandiose claims for its prospects, were beginning to make the Smithsonian look like a refuge for cranks. He told Espy that if he wanted to keep his job, he had to drop the rainmaking talk and find something more practical to work on.

  Espy was devastated. Earlier, when he still had his old brashness, he probably would have made a grand gesture of departure and appealed to the public for support. But now he lacked the strength. He gave up talking publicly about rainmaking and looked for a new project.

  He quickly found one. He announced that he was going to devise and promulgate a series of precise guidelines for mariners in hurricanes. This would immediately replace Redfield and Reid’s nonsensical rules, because it would be based on a true understanding of the wind patterns of large Atlantic storms.

  Redfield may never have been more angry in his life than he was when he heard what Espy proposed. In practical terms, whether it was right or wrong, it would be a disaster: Redfield himself had been trying for years to get the Naval Department to adopt his guidelines as official policy; so if he succeeded, and if the Smithsonian published Espy’s counterproposal, the federal government would in effect be endorsing two mutually contradictory sets of rules.

  But the real issue was Espy himself. Redfield’s letters to Reid and his other correspondents reached new heights of vindictive rage. Espy was a liar and a manipulator whose entire career had been a sham. All the endorsements he’d received from the scientific establishment, Redfield believed, were fraudulent: Espy had somehow contrived to ghostwrite the praise himself. (Redfield thought better of sending some of these letters, and they turned up in his papers after his death.)

  Redfield found himself with an unexpected ally: Robert Hare. Hare didn’t actually have the slightest interest in giving advice to mariners. But his brittle, continually repatched friendship with Espy had just come definitively apart. Hare had gone to the Smithsonian to see how his irreplaceable laboratory instruments were being treated. He had perhaps gotten the idea that they would be displayed in one of the exhibition halls, as a shrine to his decades of scientific accomplishment. Instead, they had been unceremoniously warehoused, except for those that Espy had rooted out to use for the construction of his newest nepheloscope. One of Hare’s beautiful custom-fired ceramic pestles was sitting on Espy’s desk; Espy was using it to hold table salt for his lunches.

  Hare returned to his home with a draft copy of Espy’s proposal. He subjected it to his most detailed, withering, and relentless scrutiny. He wrote up the results as another of his “strictures,” which he immediately had printed at his own expense. He then sent copies to the president, the vice president, the cabinet, and every member of Congress.

  But it went for nothing; Espy still had Joseph Henry’s public backing at the Smithsonian, and Hare’s attack was ignored. Espy’s guidelines for mariners were duly approved, published by the Smithsonian, and distributed to interested parties in America’s naval industry. Whether they were ever used isn’t clear. They were extremely complicated and impractical; they required, for instance, a series of careful barometric readings, which it’s unlikely any mariner would bother to take in the middle of a hurricane. (Redfield and Reid offered simple instructions based on incoming winds.) They were also phenomenally dangerous, based as they were on Espy’s disastrously mistaken notions of surface wind patterns in hurricanes: anyone who followed them would be led directly into the most dangerous region of the storm. If there were no recorded complaints among the users of the guidelines, it may be because there were no survivors.

  That proved to be the last great flare-up of the storm war. By then the public at large had lost interest; after two decades of the warriors slogging out their battles in lyceums and lecture halls and newspaper interviews and hot-from-the-presses pamphlets, nothing had changed, nothing had been resolved, and the entertainment value of the whole affair had long since dwindled away. Within the scientific community, the controversy had turned to frustration and indifference. Little was being published in those years on the subject of whirlwinds and other forms of violent weather; promising approaches were being immediately shot down. A natural philosopher named Elias Loomis, for instance, who had taught at Western Reserve and New York University, was attempting to draw attention to a new, and (as it proved) absolutely essential, idea: that storms could not be understood as static events but needed to be analyzed as evolving systems. Loomis spent years accumulating records and eyewitness testimony in order to reconstruct a complete narrative history of what he called “my favorite storm,” a single severe thunderstorm that he had once observed passing over the Ohio River valley. It was a brilliantly original approach to thinking about weather—the first instance on record of what’s now called synoptic analysis. But Loomis was ignored. If he’d been heard out, the progress of American meteorology might have jumped forward at least a generation.

  In the meantime, at the meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and other scientific associations, people had begun changing the subject and drifting away if they saw any of the principal warriors come within earshot. Even James Espy’s oldest friend and advocate, Alexander Bache, was heard to say that they weren’t making the slightest progress and there was simply no point in discussing the issue until something new happened.

  Joseph Henry did ultimately find Espy a noncontroversial job. He assigned Espy on missions to travel around America and the Caribbean basin in order to take barometric readings. This was in fact necessary work: little could be done with the data being sent in by weather spotters until the Smithsonian had a way of standardizing its instruments and establishing a reliable baseline of
conditions around the country. Espy performed this job conscientiously and thoroughly. There were parts of it he greatly enjoyed: he had always been a good traveler. But he still knew the score: Henry had come to think of him as a liability and was just trying to keep him out of trouble.

  In the summer of 1853, Espy was in Louisville, Kentucky. This was the region where he’d spent his childhood, and he was pleased to see how thoroughly it had been tamed: hills and meadows of bluegrass had supplanted the primeval forest; there were railway corridors where before there had only been windroads.

  At breakfast one morning on the veranda of his hotel, he happened to meet up with a married couple, a physician named Samuel Gross and his wife, who had known his wife’s family back east, and he gladly spent the morning in civilized talk. In his memoirs, Dr. Gross remembered the scene vividly. Espy, who was then nearing seventy, was “a remarkably handsome man, tall, erect, well-proportioned, with a large head and a fine face, expressive of intelligence, and he had about him all the magnetism and characteristics of a well-bred gentleman.” On the other hand, by that point Espy had come to think of conversation as synonymous with monologue. As Gross wrote, “Mr. Espy was an enthusiast. Whatever had possession of his mind was not easily dislodged by outside considerations.” He spent two hours lecturing the couple on his theory of storms. The longer Espy talked, the harder it was to tell the enthusiasm apart from anger. He spat venom at a succession of enemies—particularly those who had thwarted his rainmaking project. “This disappointment was a great, if not a constant, source of annoyance to him,” Gross concluded, “serving to embitter the evening of his life.”

  The bitterness also came to dominate his writings and correspondence. He could not stop going over old grievances. Sir John Herschel’s incomprehensible failure to accept the self-evident truth of his tornado model, for instance. “I think if Sir John Herschel examines this subject,” he wrote in a letter, “he will retract what he said nearly twenty years ago, before the British Association … He shall find, as I think he will on examination, that the theory explains more than a hundred phenomena never explained before, many of which were not known before, but predicted by the theory.” Espy still held out hope that someday Herschel would “cheerfully acknowledge” that steam power was “a magnificent specimen of inductive philosophy.”

  “I am now nearly seventy-three years of age,” he wrote in another letter, “and it would gratify me much to see my theory universally received before I die; but my gratification is a small matter compared with the interest in all mankind in adopting the true, instead of a false system. It is painful to me to see the whole meteorological world groping in the dark, for more than twenty years after the true system has been developed.”

  He made one last effort to explain the system, in a series of lectures he gave at the Smithsonian. The lectures didn’t attract much attention—except from Robert Hare, who had still not forgiven the business with the table salt. Hare wrote to Henry to protest that Espy was once again spreading his nonsense with official backing. He threatened to produce another pamphlet for the benefit of Congress, recommending that Espy’s salary be eliminated from the Smithsonian’s budget.

  Henry wrote back and told him not to bother. Espy’s salary was already being eliminated; Espy had decided to retire from the Smithsonian and move to his parents’ old home in Ohio.

  After William Redfield lost his fight over Espy’s rules for mariners, he retired at last from scientific controversy. He would have been content to vanish from public notice altogether, if something wholly unexpected hadn’t happened. In 1855, Admiral Matthew Perry returned from his great expedition to Japan, and he declared in newspaper interviews that the voyage would have been impossible without the guidelines of Redfield and Reid. Shortly afterward, Perry contacted Redfield directly. He was writing a book about the expedition, and he wanted Redfield to contribute a chapter about the typhoons of the Pacific.

  Redfield immediately agreed. Over the next several months he built up a new reference collection of books, charts, and ships’ logs about the Pacific. John Redfield recalled how happy his father was to hunker down on the floor of his study one more time with big maps and stacks of books scattered all around him and become wholly absorbed in working out the characteristic behavior of typhoons.

  Redfield had finished the chapter for Perry’s book by the end of 1856. Shortly after the New Year, he fell ill with pneumonia. He was immediately confined to bed. He passed the time by reading a new book about a polar expedition. As his condition worsened and he faded in and out of delirium, he was increasingly tormented by images from the book. In his worst days before his death on February 12, 1857, he saw himself as navigating a ship through endless ice fields toward an unknown goal.

  Robert Hare also mostly withdrew from meteorological work in those years. But he continued his researches into new terrain, and in 1854 he began demanding that the American Association for the Advancement of Science allow him to present his results. He was repeatedly rebuffed, once the association members had a glimmer of what he intended to talk about, but his public eminence and his long-standing record of scientific accomplishment forced them at last to give in. He gave a formal lecture on his new research at the annual AAAS meeting in 1855.

  He began the lecture by unveiling his newest and most daring invention. It consisted of a large disk with an attached pointer on an elaborately constructed pulley and spring. The pointer ranged freely over the disk, which had been imprinted with letters, musical notes, and a handful of phrases: “Yes,” “Doubtful,” “No,” “Don’t know,” “I think so,” “A mistake,” “I’ll spell it over,” “A message,” “Done,” “I’ll come again,” “Good-bye,” “I must leave.” Hare called the device a spiritoscope, and he informed the crowd that he had used it successfully to contact the dead.

  He had been attending séances for about a year now. At first he had been wholly skeptical, but once he had seen with his own eyes the tables moving and heard the spirits rapping, he’d begun to wonder. He could see no evidence that he was being fooled. It was unquestionably obvious to him that the characters of the mediums he visited were above reproach. He wasn’t fully convinced until a séance in which he made contact with his father and his sister on the other side.

  Hare’s father had explained the afterlife to him in considerable detail. The spirit world consisted of seven concentric spheres enclosing the earth, beginning about sixty miles up. Each level was progressively more beautiful than the one below it. By the third sphere, the vistas of mountains and forest, white-domed city skylines and pillared parks, were lovelier than anything that could be imagined on earth. The spirit world was a republic, with the government of the spheres “exercising legislative, judicial, and executive powers.” The laws, Hare’s father explained, “are realized in simultaneous and homogeneous opinions awakened in the minds of the ruling spirits, as truth takes hold of the minds of mathematicians.” Otherwise the republic was a strict meritocracy. The ruling spirits were for the most part rich men who’d used their wealth wisely.

  Hare declared that his father’s message was more convincing than the whole of the Bible, which he considered “pernicious.” It was also more satisfying to him than anything he had learned in science. Science was a dead end, he told his audiences: a lifetime of his labors had finally proved to him “our utter incapacity to comprehend the powers and properties of material atoms.” The physical world, he had concluded, was simply “beyond our comprehension.”

  His presentation went over poorly. But he was prepared for that, he told his listeners. Their criticisms were of no matter to him. A spirit had recently visited him whom they all knew; this spirit had endorsed his work and had urged him to go on with it for the benefit of mankind: Benjamin Franklin.

  Franklin had recently arranged for Hare to attend a great séance where all of his most abstract and scientific questions about the afterlife could be answered. Attending this “Convocation of Spirits,” along with Fr
anklin himself, were George Washington, Martha Washington, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Isaac Newton, the poet Lord Byron, and assorted “relatives and friends.” The answers provided by the convocation were recorded by the spiritoscope. Typical of the exchanges was this one, concerning the issue of why ghosts glow in the dark:

  Question from Hare: “Is it not luminiferous matter which causes the effulgence of spirits, analogous in its effects to that of luminiferous insects, though consisting of a spiritual material entirely different from those which enter into the luminiferous matter of insects?”

  Answer from the convocation: “Yes.”

  From his vantage at the Smithsonian, Joseph Henry remarked on the curious way the war among his three great friends and colleagues had ended—“one dead, one exhausted, one converted to Spiritualism.” Nothing had ever been resolved, and there were still no answers to any of the basic questions of the war. Neither Espy nor Hare made any attempts to reconcile in the last few years of their lives, and neither had anything further to say in public about hurricanes and tornadoes.

  In May 1858, Hare announced that he had made a new breakthrough in his spiritualist researches, which had led him to the greatest secret of the alchemists: he had created the philosopher’s stone and could now transmute base metals into gold. A few days later, before he had a chance to reveal the stone to the world, he died in his sleep. He was survived by a wife and three adult children; none of them, then or later, would admit to knowing where the stone was.

  Espy returned to his family home in Ohio. He did no more work on meteorology and instead took up a new subject: moral philosophy. He had always been a devout Christian, but he had long ago concluded that many aspects of traditional Christian theology were absurd and unconscionable—chief among them the idea of eternal damnation. He set out to write a book that would explain the absolute goodness of God and his creation. Its thesis was that any apparent evil in the world—even the destructive chaos of the tornado—was a surface illusion; behind it was a simple, lucid, and radiantly harmonious pattern in the mind of the Almighty.