In the 1830s, the American chemist Robert Hare, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, promoted an electrical theory of storms. He imagined that the atmosphere behaved like a charged Leyden jar with two electrical oceans of opposite charge: the celestial and the terrestrial. Clouds acted as the mediators between the two, suspended like pith balls in a static electrical field. When the electrical balance was disturbed, the atmosphere behaved in a way that counteracted gravity. The net result was a local diminution of pressure, inducing inward- and upward-rushing currents of air that resulted in rain, hail, thunder, lightning, and, in extreme cases, tornadoes. Hare argued strenuously that he had discovered a new electrical “discharge by convection” in the atmosphere, which formed the motive power of storms and was to be considered the complement of the famous electrical discharge by conduction discovered by Franklin in lightning strokes.5
In 1884 British physicist Oliver Lodge demonstrated that smoke and dust can be precipitated by the discharge of a static electric machine. He then asked, “Why should not natural precipitation be assisted artificially?”6 In his largest-scale experiment, he cleared a smoke-filled room and discovered that electrical charges encourage the coalescence of infinitesimally small cloud droplets into “Scotch mist or fine rain.” He opined that clearing London fogs and abating industrial or urban smoke might be a “difficult but perhaps not impossible task,” equivalent to such other noble quests as navigating the Arctic Ocean, exploring the Antarctic continent, scaling Mount Everest, and conquering tropical diseases. Lodge regarded the future prospects with hope and felt that the control of the atmosphere “will be tackled either now or by posterity” (34). But applying this technique outdoors was another matter, and he admitted the propensity of physicists “to rush in where meteorologists fear to tread!” Thus the stage was set for the cloud modifiers to add electricity to their tool kit as they attempted to make rain and dissipate fogs.
Electrified Sand
On the basis of Lodge’s theory, a U.S. patent was awarded in 1918 to John Graeme Balsillie of Melbourne, Australia, for a “process and apparatus for causing precipitation by coalescence of aqueous particles contained in the atmosphere.”7 Balsillie claimed to be able to ionize a volume of air and switch the polarity of the electrical charges in the clouds “by means of suitable ray emanations,” making them more attractive to one another and thus producing artificial rain. His apparatus, complete with a schematic diagram, consisted of an array of tethered balloons or kites linked to an electrical power supply on the ground. His patent claimed that Röntgen rays from a tube carried aloft and beamed to reflect off a metalliccoated balloon would ionize the surrounding air. In an age in which mysterious X-rays could penetrate flesh to reveal bone, the development of a rainmaking ray gun might be just around the corner. Balsillie’s balloons were charged to 320,000 volts—or at least he said they should be—and the ionization, he claimed, would extend outward for a good 200 to 300 feet from each balloon or kite—to be flown in formation (more or less) during a brewing storm. There is no evidence, however, that this patent was anything more than the inventor’s flight of fancy—except for its influence on L. Francis Warren and his associates.
Round 1: Dayton, Ohio
“Fliers Bring Rain with Electric Sand,” the New York Times headline announced on February 12, 1923. The story itself, however, was quite underwhelming. Between 1921 and 1923, field trials conducted in Dayton, Ohio, at McCook Field seemed to show that electrified sand could dissipate clouds and might someday both dispel fog and generate artificial rain. The demonstrations were the brainchild of Luke Francis Warren (fl. 1930), a self-styled and self-taught independent inventor and dreamer who frequently misstated his credentials as “Dr. Warren of Harvard University.” Credibility and financial support came from Wilder D. Bancroft (1867–1953), a well-ensconced but controversial chemistry professor at Cornell University. Technical assistance came from Emory Leon Chaffee (1885–1975), a Harvard University electrophysicist, and the U.S. Army Air Service provided aircraft facilities (and a patina of respectability). Although the hope of making rain and driving mists from cities, harbors, and flying fields was great, the hype was even greater. Little is known about Warren, save for a few press clippings, but his story can be told through documents in the Bancroft Papers at Cornell.
Wilder Bancroft, grandson of the famous historian and statesman George Bancroft, was expected to do great things. He studied physical chemistry with Wilhelm Ostwald in Leipzig and J. H. van’t Hoff in Amsterdam before joining the faculty of Cornell University in 1895. Bancroft was seemingly more adept at writing than at chemistry. He attracted students with his genteel style and wit more than with his laboratory technique, while he dedicated his considerable writing skills to the new Journal of Physical Chemistry, which he edited for thirtyseven years. During the Great War, Bancroft served in the Chemical Warfare Service and wrote its history; after the war, he chaired the Division of Chemistry of the National Research Council. Back at Cornell, Bancroft worked on colloid chemistry, the chemical physics of finely divided matter in suspension—for example, in such complex fluids as ink, wine, milk, smoke, and fog. Thinking about fog, specifically fog dissipation, brought Bancroft into the controversial field of weather control. If, in laboratory tests, electric fields precipitated smoke and fog, why would they not do so in nature?
At the time, Bancroft was under fire from critics for his lack of clarity in organic chemistry and for having missed most of the new physical implications of quantum mechanics. He was busy trying to keep his struggling journal afloat, more by diplomacy and fund-raising than by the influx of new ideas. The marketing of ideas was important to Bancroft. He once opined, “Since the greatest discoveries are likely to be ones for which the world is least ready ... the greatest scientific men should really be super-salesmen.” On weather control, however, he chose to stand on the sidelines as an investor and cheerleader and allowed his associate Warren to take the point position as advocate and business “rainmaker,” if not super-salesman. As the airplane was opening up a new era in weather control, Bancroft wrote to Warren in 1920, “[i]t would probably be absolutely prohibitive in cost to produce rain by spraying clouds from beneath; but it is quite possible that you can get satisfactory results by spraying from above.”8
To get his ideas off the ground, Warren lobbied in Washington, D.C., lunching and dining on Bancroft’s dime, with “leading men of the air force.” Initially, the military offered merely to take electrical measurements at its flying fields. General Electric was interested in providing the electrical equipment. Major William Blair, who had led the meteorological efforts of the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the war, offered the use of an airplane. The lobbying possibilities were endless. Warren wrote to Bancroft that he had to move quickly, or “I shall be forced to go through the entertainment and visit stunts with a ‘new bunch of guys’, but as I like them all, and have a soft spot in my make-up for all mankind, I do not apprehend serious trouble, but only inconvenience, as there will be days here when I can do little more than spend denario [mainly Bancroft’s] and kick up my heels away from home.” Detained in Washington over a weekend, Warren ended his letter to Bancroft with a list of his possible activities, including “attending the aviators ball at Langley Field, playing in the parks with the kids on Sunday, or flirting with the hat girls at the restaurants.”9
His lobbying efforts eventually paid off, though, and the army provided funds for an initial field test. In the summer of 1921, Warren contracted for electrical work to be done by the physicist Chaffee at Harvard’s Cruft High Tension Electrical Laboratory. Chaffee examined the theoretical basis for charging small particles with high voltage, built a generator that would run off an aircraft motor, and designed the best way to disperse the sand, which he determined was through an electrically energized nozzle and the prop backwash.10 Warren arrived in Dayton on September 7 and began to install equipment on the aircraft. The army paid to bring Chaffee out at $25 a day plus ex
penses, but Warren chose to stay off the payroll to protect his business rights, since he was then in the process of applying for multiple international patents. The U.S. Army Air Service provided him with two planes, pilots and observers, a car and driver, a stenographer, and a coordinating officer—Major T. H. Bane. Not all was going smoothly, however. Warren had fallen behind on payments to his creditors and, as usual, was writing to Bancroft seeking financial aid “to help me out of this mess.” His plan was to “go above detached clouds and try to cause precipitation in the form of trailing rain. We should be able to pull this stunt off within ten days, I hope.”11
In the “stunts” (they can hardly be called experiments), a La Pere plane flying above the cloud tops sprinkled sand charged to approximately 10,000 volts by an on-board wind-driven generator. The electrified sand was dispensed through musket-shaped nozzles (figure 4.1) and further scattered across the clouds by the action of the airplane’s propeller. Sometimes, but only sometimes, these aerial “attacks” opened clearings in fair-weather cumulus clouds or dissipated them completely. Although the stated goal of the project was to clear airport fogs and generate rain, no tests were conducted on low-level stratus or nimbus clouds. Other than a dramatic exhibition of the prowess of aviators (it was known at the time that the backwash from propellers alone could bust up clouds by mixing them with surrounding drier air), nobody knew why the electrified sand technique should work.
Alluding in vague terms to small-scale smoke-clearing demonstrations under laboratory conditions, Warren offered up some technical mumbo jumbo about the effect of electrified sand particles accelerating the “free electrons in a mass of air.” He told the press and his patrons (but never published) his theory that “each electron attaches itself to a certain number of molecules and so forms a gas ion, upon which moisture condenses, thereby making a cloud particle.”12 He claimed that his technique produced “a so-called trigger action, forcing the elec-trical charge in the cloud to change from a static to a kinetic state that will rapidly spread or flash over the whole clouded area from the spraying of only a few pounds of dust over a small part of a highly charged storm movement and force precipitation when the wet bulb conditions are favorable over the dry section” (3). By changing the polarity of his generator, he said, he could reverse the process and produce “a large hole, in a fraction of a minute ... through the entire cloud from top to bottom” (3). Of course this is gobbley-gook, akin to the unsupported technical claims invoked by the charlatan rain fakers. When asked why he was intercepting only fair-weather clouds, Warren cited the absence of suitable fog in Dayton and the danger of flying through rain clouds, since all were “highly electrified and it was not deemed safe to deal with them with high voltage until measures were taken to guard against possible accidents to the pilots and planes” (3).
4.1 Fog dispersal apparatus: sand being discharged through nozzles that are carrying a potential of 10,000 volts. (NATIONAL ARCHIVES PHOTO B8241)
Aviation pioneer Orville Wright, who worked at McCook Field, witnessed one of the test flights through his office window and sent a telegram to the New York Times. He testified that he saw aviators cut to pieces three cumulus clouds in ten minutes, but saw no rain fall: “Having little knowledge of meteorology and the other sciences involved in the experiment, I do not wish to be understood as expressing any opinion as to the practical value of the experiment nor of the possibilities that may develop from them.”13 Navy commander Karl F. Smith was also watching. His memo, “Dr. Warren—Rainmaker,” noted that as an observer he was “not gullible and had remained skeptical,” but seeing a cloud split in two by the technique was “absolutely uncanny.”14 The military applications were obvious. Smith envisioned special-purpose “clearing ships” for enhancing aerial navigation by dissipating fog or for cutting holes in clouds for bombing operations while keeping the main cloud bank intact for cover. Although he was not fully convinced, he thought Warren’s technique “so important” that, after a few more trials, the U.S. Navy Bureau of Aeronautics should either present it to the Patent Office or purchase outright Warren’s rights and retain them for military purposes. Had Warren agreed, he could have cashed in on his invention then and there. Instead, he reserved his rights, immediately formed the A. R. Company (for “Artificial Rain”), and issued Bancroft 1,000 shares of stock at $5 a share. He also filed a U.S. patent application for “Condensing, Coalescing, and Precipitating Atmospheric Moisture.”15
When the story was initially reported in the newspapers, cartoonists immediately got to work. One set of panels published in the New York World fantasized about using the technique for raining out Sunday baseball games, ruining a rival’s new hat, fighting fires, disrupting parades, and selling umbrellas (figure 4.2).
In March 1923, one month after the initial publicity, U.S. Weather Bureau librarian and widely read weather popularizer Charles Fitzhugh Talman reported that meteorologists remained unconvinced by the Dayton tests.16 In a weather bureau press release, William Jackson Humphreys contrasted the puny efforts of the rainmakers with the enormous scale of the atmosphere and called their techniques “entirely futile.” He compared the techniques of Bancroft and Warren with those of earlier rain kings: “The idea of the college professor and his aviator friends out in Cleveland, to sprinkle electrically charged sand on a cloud while above it in an airplane, is picturesque and plausible,” he noted, “but won’t work in commercial quantities.”17 Given the enormous forces at work in the atmosphere, Humphreys warned farmers in arid regions not to pay out their good money for so-called rainmaking devices: “Wet weather a la carte—the dream of meteorologists, farmers, and umbrella salesmen for a good many years—is still an empty mirage.”18 In response, Bancroft wrote: “No use arguing with Weather Bureau. Prefer to wait for results and let them do the explaining.”19 A cartoonist captured the tension between the new high-tech possibilities and domestic farm life, with the grizzled older man representing both worlds (figure 4.3).
4.2 “Rain to Order”: lampoon of possible applications of rainmaking using electrified sand. (CARTOON BY AL FRUEH, IN NEW YORK WORLD, FEBRUARY 15, 1923; BANCROFT PAPERS)
The May 1923 issue of Popular Science Monthly described the Warren–Bancroft demonstrations and hyped the story: “Think of it! Rain when you want it. Sunshine when you want it. Los Angeles weather in Pittsburgh and April showers for the arid deserts of the West. Man in control of the heavens—to turn them on or shut them off as he wishes.”20 In an illustration, an electrified plane turns smog over a city into artificial clouds, while a second plane clears the air by generating artificial rain (figure 4.4).
Warren claimed that a number of practical applications were just over the horizon: clearing the smoke from cities, removing London fogs, intervening in the course of naval battles, bringing rain to the farmers. As he explained it, the electricity generated by falling sand and rain would cause more rain to generate in the adjacent clouds and set off the entire heavens, much in the manner of a long fuse, thus causing widespread rains. Bancroft, who had been supportive all along, yet constantly worried about the expenditures, doubted this. Concerned about possible lawsuits downwind of their operations, he recommended that they conduct field trials not over cities but over the Atlantic Ocean, both as a safety precaution and as an opportunity to experiment on marine fogs.
4.3 “The Rain Makers”: “Go up and bust that there cloud over th’ ten-acre field, Noah—before somebody else gets it; an’ fer th’ love o’ peace, keep off th’ ol’ woman’s washin’!” (“THE RAIN MAKERS,” LIFE, APRIL 5, 1923, 24)
4.4 The way scientists propose to manufacture clouds and rainfall: “The first plane, trailing sparking antennae, condenses the soot and moisture laden air into a cloud by scattering electric charges. The second plane turns this cloud into rain by spraying it with electrically charged sand.” (MCFADDEN, “IS RAINMAKING RIDDLE SOLVED?”)
Round 2: Aberdeen and Bolling
In March 1923, seeking better access to government patrons,
Warren moved the test flights to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, on the Chesapeake Bay northeast of Baltimore. It was an adequate but not ideal site. Only about a third of the area was available for tests, since the army’s gun-firing range was given first priority. There was no machine shop or other manufacturing facilities, so Warren purchased commercial transformers, which turned out to be too heavy to fly and more costly than originally budgeted. Other delays were caused by problems with workers, a continual lack of funds, and an inordinate amount of red tape.
Fixing the Sky Page 16