Fixing the Sky

by James Rodger Fleming

  Espy scoured the literature for supporting evidence. He cited Martin Dobrizhoffer, an Austrian Jesuit evangelist in South America who wrote that he witnessed the tribes of the Abipones in Paraguay producing rain (in an admittedly very rainy climate) by setting fire to the plains. He also cited the practice of American Indians burning the prairies to produce rain, and he called for his correspondents to send in reports and testimonies of similar instances supporting his theory. An observer in Louisiana wrote that a conflagration in the long grass in the prairies of that state was soon followed by rain.

  In 1845 Espy issued a circular letter “To the Friends of Science” with specific details of his rainmaking plan. He proposed a massive experiment along the Alleghany Mountains (a region quite familiar to him): “Let forty acres ... be fired every seven days through the summer in each of the counties of McKean, Clearfield, Cambria, and Somerset, in Pennsylvania; Alleghany in Maryland; and Hardy, Pendleton, Bath, Alleghany, and Montgomery, in Virginia.” Espy anticipated the effects of upper-air wind shear by recommending that woodlots several miles apart be fired, “so that the up-moving column of air which shall be formed over them may have a wide base, and thus may ascend to a considerable height before it may be leaned out of perpendicular by any wind which may exist at the time.”14

  He also proposed an even larger, continental-scale project that involved simultaneously firing masses of timber in the amount of 40 acres every 20 miles, every seven days, along a line of 600 or 700 miles in the western United States along the Rocky Mountains. Espy predicted that the probable outcome of this managed system would be regular, gentle, and steady rains sweeping across the entire country like clockwork for the benefit of farmers and navigators. Here is how Espy explained his plan:

  A rain of great length, north and south will commence near or on the line of fires; this rain will travel eastward; it will not break up till it reaches far into the Atlantic Ocean; it will rain over the whole country east of the place of beginning; it will rain only a short time in any one place; it will not rain again until the next seventh day; it will rain enough and not too much in any one place; it will not be attended with violent wind, neither on land or on the Atlantic Ocean; there will be no hail nor tornadoes at the time of the general rain nor intermediate; there will be no destructive floods, nor will the waters ever become very low; there will be no more oppressive heats nor injurious colds; the farmers and the mariners will always know before the rains when they will commence and when they will terminate; all epidemic diseases originating from floods and subsequent droughts will cease; the proceeds of agriculture will greatly increase, and the health and happiness of the citizens will be much promoted. (51)

  Espy presented the testimonies of eyewitnesses who saw both clouds and rain produced by fires. The good citizens of Coudersport, Pennsylvania, including attorneys, judges, and ministers, attested that both clouds and rain were produced by the burning of a fallow field in July 1844. Similar phenomena had attended a prairie fire in Indiana the previous summer. Surveyor George Mackay claimed to have stimulated convective showers in Florida by cutting and burning “exceedingly inflammable” saw grass: “We often fired the saw-grass marshes afterward ; and whenever there was no wind stirring, we were sure to get a shower.”15 Apparently, a number of farmers in Florida were in the habit of setting grass fires to produce rain when they planted their corn. A forest fire in Isle Royale, Michigan, in 1846 produced similar results, as did extensive forest fires in Nova Scotia and, apparently, coal burning in the industrial city of Manchester, England.

  Perhaps the most striking eyewitness testimony of “steam power” of the atmosphere being kindled by a great fire was sent to Espy by the Reverend J. D. Williamsom, who was hiking with a companion on a mountain summit near Keene, New Hampshire, in July 1856: “The weather was excessively hot. Not a cloud was to be seen, nor was there a breath of wind stirring. Looking to the southeast at a distance of some five or six miles, I saw a fire just kindled in a fallow of some acres in extent. The column of smoke ascended perpendicularly and unbroken.” Williamsom, who was familiar with Espy’s theory, remarked to a companion that the fire should soon produce rain unless disturbed by upper currents:

  Up went the column strait as an arrow, and anon it began to expand at the top and assume the appearance of cloud. This cloud, with its base stationary, expanded upward, and swelled as if a huge engine was below with its valve open for the escape of steam.... Soon the rain began to descend ... [and the cloud] sailed off in an eastern direction, pouring down torrents of rain.... I have ever regarded [this event] as a perfect and undeniable demonstration of the truth of [your] theory, and I can no more doubt it than I can doubt the evidence of my senses.16

  For his work in mapping and forecasting and for his tireless promotion of rainmaking, Espy earned the derisive sobriquet “the Storm King.”

  Eliza Leslie’s “Rain King”

  The year Espy moved to Washington, the popular magazine writer Eliza Leslie published a short story in Godey’s Lady’s Book called “The Rain King, or, A Glance at the Next Century,” a fanciful account of rainmaking a century in the future, in 1942. In the story, Espy’s great-great-grand-nephew, the new Rain King, offers weather on demand for the Philadelphia area. Various factions vie for the weather they desire. Scores of alfalfa farmers and three hundred washerwomen petition the Rain King for fine weather forever, while corn growers, cabmen, and umbrella makers want consistent rains. Fair-weather and foul-weather factions apply in equal numbers until the balance is tipped by a late request from a highsociety matron desperately seeking a hard rain to muddy the roads and prevent a visit by her country-bumpkin cousins.

  When the artificial rains come, they satisfy no one and raise widespread suspicions. The Rain King, suddenly unpopular because he lacks the miraculous power to please everybody, takes a steamboat to China, where he studies magic in anticipation of returning someday with new offerings. “Natural rains had never occasioned anything worse than submissive regret to those who suffered inconvenience from them, and were always received more in sorrow than in anger,” Leslie wrote. “But these artificial rains were taken more in anger than in sorrow, by all who did not want them.”17

  Leslie’s short, humorous fantasy revealed a dramatic and instantaneous change in public attitudes “precipitated” by artificial weather control. Although Leslie was no meteorologist, her tale “showed a far better grasp of weather’s human dimensions and of the pitfalls of weather control than anything Espy ever wrote.”18 Since then, however, the intractable human dimensions of weather and climate control have taken a backseat to the technical schemes of optimistic rain kings and climate engineers with relatively simple ideas, or at least angles.

  Espy received honorable mention in 1843 in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Hall of Fantasy”—a marketplace of wild ideas that most of us visit at least once but some dreamers occupy permanently; a marketplace seemingly perfectly suited to the millennial ideas of rain kings and climate engineers. Here the statues of the rulers and demigods of imagination—Homer, Dante, Milton, Goethe—are memorialized in stone, while those of more limited and ephemeral fame are made of wood. Plato’s Idea looms over all. Here are social reformers, abolitionists, and Second Adventist “Father [William] Miller himself!” Civil and social engineers propound ideas of “cities to be built, as if by magic, in the heart of pathless forests; and of streets to be laid out, where now the sea was tossing; and of mighty rivers to be stayed in their courses, in order to turn the machinery of a cotton-mill.”19 “Upon my word,” exclaimed Hawthorne, “it is dangerous to listen to such dreamers as these! Their madness is contagious” (204). Here are inventors of fantastic machines aimed to “reduce day dreams to practice”: models of a railroad through the air, a tunnel under the sea, distilling machines for capturing heat from moonshine and for condensing morning mist into square blocks of granite, and a lens for making sunshine out of a lady’s smile. “Professor Espy was here,” reminiscent of Aeolus, the
god of the winds, “with a tremendous storm in a gum-elastic bag” (206). The “inmates of the hall,” it is said (remember that all pass through here on occasion), take up permanent residence by throwing themselves into “the current of a theory,” oblivious to the “landmarks of fact” passing along the stream’s bank.

  Cannon and Bells

  Charles Le Maout (1805–1887), a pharmacist and mine assayer in Saint-Brieuc, near the coast of Brittany, was a dedicated pacifist. One of his powerful arguments in favor of peace went far beyond typical arguments invoking the carnage, desolation, and miseries of war. He thought that war, especially cannonading but also the ringing of bells, destroyed the fragile equilibrium of the aerial elements and was responsible for undesirable atmospheric perturbations of all kinds, including rain, hail, thunder, lightning, harsh winters, and possibly airborne epidemic diseases. He wrote:

  To have a proper idea of the fragility of the atmosphere in which we are destined to live, like fish in the depths of the sea, we ought to imagine ourselves inhabiting a crystal palace which, on the firing of a cannon, would be shattered to atoms over our heads.... As soon as the cannon cease firing or the bells cease sounding, when the sky is cloudy or overcast, the weather clears up and the blue sky and sunshine appear.... I am not thus wrong to say that God creates fine weather and man turns it foul.20

  During the memorable siege of Sevastopol (1854–1855), which he observed, Le Maout said “all of nature was affected” by the cannonading, which he claimed caused a widespread outbreak of whooping cough. He convinced Marshal Jean-Baptiste Philibert Vaillant, the scientifically minded French minister of war who had instituted telegraphic weather reports, to order his artillery officers to record the weather on days when cannon were being fired. The results were inconclusive, and Vaillant, unimpressed by the outcome, disavowed the theory in the Journal officiel de l’Empire, concluding, “The famous influence of cannon is illusory.”21

  Disappointed but undaunted, Le Maout collected his own statistics to show that the weather in years with peace was more salubrious than in those with war. He advised keeping both the guns and the church bells of Europe and the Mediterranean silent, both in war and during celebrations, since their concussions disrupted the natural course of the winds and produced clouds and condensation at immense distances:

  Man has two powerful agents at his disposal [guns and church bells], for influencing the atmosphere. He can, if he pleases ... govern the aerial phenomena; and (were all human disturbance to cease on the surface of the globe) the air, in obedience to the laws of attraction, would probably return to a state of repose, as does the surface of the sea when not agitated by storms. 22

  Conversely, he argued that selective cannonading and bell ringing during times of drought might provide relief for agriculture. Le Maout was convinced that he had presented the most powerful argument for the establishment of universal peace and urged his readers to propagate and popularize this doctrine for the sake of humanity. Waxing poetic, he wrote:

  Nature prepares the storms and tempests; man makes them explode.

  God makes good weather; man makes it bad.

  He who sows with gunpowder will reap the storm.23

  War and the Weather

  In America, the enthusiasm for “har vesting the storm” with gunpowder and other explosives was just beginning. During the Civil War, some observers began to suspect that the smoke and concussion of artillery fire generated rain. After all, didn’t it tend to rain a day, or two ... or three ... following most battles? The heavy fighting at Gettysburg on the first three days of July 1863 under fair skies was followed by torrential downpours on July 4 that lasted all day and into the night, resulting in roads knee-deep in mud and water that hampered the Confederate retreat. Skeptics hastened to point out that the connection between war and the weather was an ancient one—and a shaky one.

  In Plutarch’s “Caius Marius” (75 C.E.), “it is observed, indeed, that extraordinary rains generally fall after great battles; whether it be, that some deity chooses to wash and purify the earth with water from above, or whether the blood and corruption, by the moist and heavy vapors they emit, thicken the air, which is likely to be altered by the smallest cause.”24 According to William Jackson Humphreys, Plutarch’s first option was a matter of belief, not science, while his second option was not significant, since only about 0.01 inch of rain would fall over a square mile if ten thousand soldiers, assuming they were nothing but blood and sweat, “were wholly evaporated and then all condensed back.”25 Humphreys posed a plausible explanation for the apparently high correlation between rains and battles. He noted that plans were usually made and battles fought in good weather, so that after the battle in the temperate regions of Europe or North America rain will often occur in accordance with the natural three- to five-day periodicity for such events. Perhaps generals simply preferred to fight under fair skies, with rainy days therefore tending naturally to follow. Perhaps it would tend to rain several days after doing most anything!

  In 1871 Chicago civil engineer and retired Civil War general Edward Powers published his book War and the Weather, or, The Artificial Production of Rain, in which he reviewed the weather following selected battles and contended that rain followed artillery engagements—usually within several days. Powers found a “perfect explanation” for this in the theory of oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury, who maintained that there were two great atmospheric currents, the equatorial and the polar, flowing aloft in nearly opposite directions. Powers argued that the concussion of battle caused these higher strata to mix and release their moisture. He envisioned stimulating rainfall on demand through the agency of loud noises, perhaps by detonating explosive charges carried aloft by kites or balloons. In times of drought, when the ground was bone-dry, he envisioned tapping into the elevated rivers of air that carried abundant moisture from the Pacific Ocean. Analogous to drilling for groundwater, aerial explosions would merely release the moisture that was already up there, traveling overhead. Seven decades later, this “river of air” would be called the jet stream and would be deemed important not for its moisture, since it is absolutely desiccated, but for its dynamic effects on high-flying aircraft and on surface weather.

  When critics pointed out that loud concussions, if effective, should cause it to rain immediately, not hours or days later, Powers fell back on his two-current theory: “The center of the atmospheric disturbance caused by a battle should remain in the vicinity of the battlefield while the two currents are mixing together and initiating the process that leads to rain—a process which, it is plain, must require time in reaching a state of effective action.”26 However deficient in meteorological details, Powers’s theory was appealing to desperate farmers, like those in New England at the time, since it directed their hopeful gaze aloft, away from their parched fields and devastated crops. Powers reminded them that there is an ocean of moisture derived not from surface evaporation but from the Pacific Ocean and just waiting to be tapped. However, one observer noted that no effect on the weather had been perceived in the Rocky Mountains after years of blasting for mining and road-building operations.27

  Powers sought support for his theory from the U.S. Army Signal Office weather service and through his representative, Charles Farwell (R-Illinois), who championed this cause for the next two decades. After reviewing Powers’s theory and his proposal to fire three hundred cannon arranged in a circle a mile across, the House Committee on Agriculture concluded in a report that the government should act unilaterally on this issue of great significance and support Powers’s field experiments: “We have the powder, and we have the guns, and the men to serve them, and we ought not to leave to other nations and to after-ages the task of solving the great question as to whether the control of the weather is not, to a useful extent, within the reach of man.”28 In another proposal, Powers suggested employing the siege guns at the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois for rainmaking experiments at a cost, per rainstorm, of $21,000, an amount he cla
imed was much less expensive than the cost of irrigation or the loss of crops due to lack of rain, but an amount that could outfit more than a score of family farms. The proposals were not funded.

  Powers finally found an ally in Daniel Ruggles of Fredericksburg, Virginia. Ruggles was a West Point graduate, a former general in the Confederate Army, and the owner of a ranch in Rio Bravo, Texas, who received a patent in 1880 “for producing rain fall ... by conveying and exploding torpedoes or other explosive agents within the cloud realm.”29 Ruggles’s “invention” consisted, in brief, of a balloon carrying torpedoes and cartridges charged with such explosives as nitroglycerine, dynamite, gun cotton, gunpowder, or fulminates, and connecting the balloon with an electrical apparatus for exploding the ordnance.

  Like his predecessor Espy, Ruggles made surprising claims to have “invented a method for condensing clouds in the atmospheric realm, and for precipitating rainfall from rain-clouds, to prevent drought, to stimulate and sustain vegetation, to equalize rainfall and waterflow, and by combining the available scientific inventions of the age, to guard against pestilence and famine, and to prevent, or to alleviate them where prevailing.”30 He claimed that the concussions and vibrations of the explosions would, under the proper conditions, consolidate the “diffused mists” passing overhead into rainfalls. His scheme favored the remote detonation of the explosives using timed fuses or electric wires, but for more precision (and much greater risk) he also imagined aeronauts bombing the clouds with torpedoes attached to parachutes. Promising scientific rigor (still a challenge today in rainmaking), he proposed to select clouds on which to experiment in conformity with “well-defined meteorological data,” which he listed as “barometric tension, thermometer and its changes, hygrometer, anemometer, anemoscope ..., elevation, average rainfall, river stages, and magneto-electric condition of the atmosphere” (10).