Hey do y’all remember when Trump said “I’m a very stable genius who knows more than the top generals and scientists so let’s bomb that hurricane with a nuke.” That’s at least how I remember the quote.
I’m not saying “let’s give the man some credit,” because fucking don’t. But he wasn’t the first idiot politician who decided to throw high explosives at the heavens to control the weather.
Today’s Moment of Science… primitive geoengineering.
You know how you’ve got a friend who’s never been to an upper level science class but they know what they saw, they’ve got a theory, and you can’t learn them otherwise? In this story, that’s retired Civil War General Edward Powers. It rained after battles sometimes, so he had himself a little hypothesis.
The idea of humans influencing the weather wasn’t new, nor was associating war with storm. But it was specifically the intensity of the noise from these skirmishes, he surmised, and not the battle itself that must have caused the rain. It couldn’t have been that, you know, it sometimes gets cloudy and precipitation happens. Nope, said Powers. Loud booms make clouds go AAAAHHHH. That’s science.
General Powers wrote a book on it called War and the Weather, with the idea branded ‘Concussion Theory.’ Even in the 1870s, scientists were largely like ‘yeah General, you go out and shoot at the moon bruh, we’ve got a cholera pandemic to mop up.’
Powers tried to get someone to listen for years, to no avail. But over the long arc of history, there exists no idea bad enough to dissuade every politician from testing it against their polling numbers.
So, Senator Charles B. Farwell.
Before I make fun of this rep from Illinois, he introduced an amendment in the 1880s to give women the right to vote about 30 years before it happened. Cool. But now we gotta talk about the ‘sky-dynamite-for-science’ incident.
Maybe it was Powers’ soaring rhetoric in War and the Weather. Maybe it was a dream that he’d be a hero to the Illinois farmers for bringing rain on command with some light drumming. Either way, Farwell went to Congress and was like “guys, hear me out.” They did the only responsible thing: gave him a bunch of cash and told him “sure, bomb the fucking clouds, Chuck.”
In an effort to not work on the ‘go bang make rain’ initiative, every department that employed real scientists told him making it rain was another government office’s job. Best he could get was a patent lawyer named Robert Dyrenforth. He’d previously been approached with patents for various ‘rainmakers.’ This one intrigued him. He got very involved in the set up of Farwell’s experiment.
August, 1891.
Dyrenforth, General Powers, meteorologist George Curtis, a few other real scientists, and a bunch of enthusiastic yahoos who wanted to blow shit up, uh, I mean help with scientific research showed up on the prairie of Texas.
The thing about wannabe rainmakers is that no matter what tiny insignificant thing they fuck around the sky with, it’s gonna get wet eventually, and they likely had nothing to do with it.
Though a mist of rain fell in the day or so after each test, no measurements were taken to check for increased rainfall near the noise. In several cases, rain fell in the area of the blasts, but not where they’d occurred, straining credulity. Dyrenforth reported a success though, because clearly his wrath had incurred this… drizzle.
His self-reported successes initially made believers out of many. However, Curtis the meteorologist wrote a scathing report published in Nature on the lack of scientific credibility in Dyrenforth’s claims. His own data was eventually his undoing, and we learned for not the last time that we can’t control the weather.
Dyrenforth went on to share a nickname with Ben Shapiro: Dryhenceforth.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, wondering if the two most American things are bombing clouds and deep frying butter.
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