Betting on the Weather
In the early 1950s, more than $2 million in legal claims were filed against New York City by upstate residents for purported damage caused by the cloud-seeding efforts of Dr. Wallace E. Howell over the Catskill Mountains reservoirs. Although the lawsuits were eventually dismissed because of technicalities, an elderly raconteur and bon vivant, Colonel John R. Stingo, who often referred to himself as “the Honest Rainmaker,” was astonished that men of science at that time were becoming targets of damage suits and hard feelings, when decades earlier his own rain-inducing efforts had generated nothing but good feelings for all involved. The noted New Yorker columnist A. J. Liebling caught up with Stingo (whose name means literally “strong brew”) at a series of Manhattan watering holes and heard his creatively embellished, colorful, improbable, and possibly misleading stories of how in yesteryear he had lived by his wits and bet with the odds (but never with his own money) on prizefights, on the horses (when betting at the track was outlawed), and, of course, on the weather. For him, rainmaking was a confidence game and not at all a scientific endeavor. Liebling described Stingo as neatly dressed, short of stature, lively, and quick of wit, with the air of an old military man; his habitual expression “that of a stud-poker player with one ace showing who wants to give the impression that he has another in the hole”;37 his typical regimen a series of golden gin fizzes with egg yolk in the morning, hard liquor at midday, and then beer and wine for the duration.
Stingo, a weaver of tall tales, claimed that as a youth in 1908 he had witnessed a memorable but ultimately futile rainmaking extravaganza in the Lower San Joaquin Valley. To save his wheat crop, Captain James McKittrick had invited Egypt’s leading rainmaker, (the fictional) “Sudi Witte Pasha,” and his entourage of twenty-two professors and holy men, and assorted cantors, priests, bell ringers, soothsayers, dancing girls, chefs, servants, and bodyguards, to his (also fictional) 212,000-acre estate, “Rancho del McKittrick.” Their rainmaking technique consisted of chants, prayers, ablutions, and dancing, lots of dancing, over the course of three days. On the fourth day, the pasha and his crew scattered ground-up kofu beans from ancient Persia in the fields and hosted a feast for three hundred guests, an “Orgy in Imploration for Rain,” that lasted into the fifth day. After several more days of waiting, with no rain in sight, the formerly jolly Captain McKittrick, who was out about $200,000 in expenses, decided to ship the pasha and his entourage to the nearest railroad station, thence “to the outgoing Pelican Express for Phoenix, Fort Worth and New Orleans,” and finally by steamer “from the Crescent City through the Straits of Gibraltar to the palm-waving beaches of dear old Cairo” (12–13). Stingo was impressed by the pasha’s show but judged his timing unfortunate in that the Fates did not deliver normal rainfall that week. He took away from the experience the impression that an American market might require a show with less exoticism and more displays of cold science and impressive paraphernalia, perhaps with a spiritual note.
The colonel then related his early efforts out west in 1912, when he was the front man or setup man for the rainmaking show of “Professor Joseph Canfield Hatfield” (again a made-up name). To clinch a deal, Stingo (at that time working under his given name, James A. Macdonald) would warm up a crowd of farmers with a version of the following speech:
Rain—its abundance, its paucity—meant Life and Death to the Ancients, for from the lands and flocks, herds, the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the deer and mountain goat they found sustenance and energized their being. All the elements depend upon the Fall of Rain, ample but not in ruinous overplus, for very existence. Through human history the plentitude of Rain or its lack constituted the difference between Life and Death, the Joy of Rain or existence and misery. (11)
Next onstage was the director of ordnance, Dr. George Ambrosius Immanuel Morrison Sykes, who would explain how barraging the clouds with cannon and a rapid-fire Gatling gun would wring out their moisture. Then J. C. Hatfield himself, not a particularly eloquent or convincing man but a true believer in his techniques, would mumble something about how Marco Polo had returned from Cathay with an explosive yellow powder and stories of its use as a rainmaking device in ancient China. Finally, it was up to Macdonald to close the deal (or set the hook) by getting the local farm officials to sign a contract for “detonationary services” with the Hatfield Rain Precipitation Corporation, at $10,000 an inch of rain for up to 3 inches and $80,000 for a full 4 inches. Stingo confessed to Liebling, “All first-class Boob Traps must contain a real smart Ace-In-The-Hole,” and the rainmaking company’s consisted of converting weather bureau tables, charts, and rainfall averages into a set of betting odds, a kind of pari-mutuel handicapping that the company estimated to be 55 percent in its favor. He then described how 5,000 people had turned out on a hot, dry afternoon to watch the team set off the ordnance show, how Hatfield climbed the mountain like an Old Testament prophet, how Sykes’s spouse gathered the faithful together to pray for rain, how the guns roared and the smoke billowed, how a storm came up at midnight and drenched the valley, how the rainmakers took credit for this, and how the local populace subsequently prospered, praising Hatfield’s powers and paying the rainmakers the $80,000. Macdonald’s cut was $22,000. The team repeated the show, successfully, in Oregon the next summer, but business tapered off in subsequent years after the farm guild bought its own cannon (16–19).
We know from newspaper accounts that one of Stingo’s stories was based in fact. In 1930, in the depths of the Great Depression and Prohibition, Stingo was working the crowds at Belmont Park, living by his wits, and writing a horse-racing column for the New York Enquirer, an unpaid position but one that kept him in circulation. During a rainy week in early September, he spotted his old comrade in rainmaking, Sykes—now a “minister of Zoroastrianism,” a flat-earther, and another Wizard of Oz—who was in the process of trying to convince the track officials (and other “solvent boobs”) that his California-based U.S. Weather Control Bureau could prevent rain during the racing season and save the track from bankruptcy (29–35). Sykes, who used neologisms freely, claimed that he controlled the weather through “dynurgy, xurgy, psychurgy ... isogonic force, quantumie ... Bolecular energy, freenurgy—especially freenurgy ... and thermurgy.”38
Soon Stingo and Sykes were back in business as equal partners: Stingo was to run the office, calculate the odds of rain in September, do most of the talking, and close the deal; Sykes would act as the incomprehensible true zealot and set up and operate his mysterious rain machine (which could be run in reverse, he said, to drive away the rain). The deal included a 10 percent cut for Mrs. Sykes, not for leading the prayers, as she had done in 1912, but for improving public relations by mixing pitchers of “Pisco Punch,” a legendary smooth and fruity drink featuring Peruvian pisco brandy, made popular during the California gold rush.
Stingo sweet-talked the millionaire sponsors of this project, Joseph E. Widener, president of the Westchester Racing Association, and his female associate, the “long, lissome, and lucreferous” Mrs. Harriman, whose critical weaknesses included belief in the occult and “an inquiring mind.” Then he made his pitch: “We, the U.S. Weather Control Bureau ... agree to induct, maintain and operate the Iodine Silvery-Spray and Gamma-Ray-Radio system” for a payment of $2,500 for each of two dry Saturdays and $1,000 for each intervening weekday, with a forfeiture of $2,000 for every day it rained, the track to pay for the buildings and labor. The rain suppressors stood to make $10,000 if every day was clear and to lose $4,000 if it rained every day. They calculated the climatological odds as 0.7499 in their favor.39
Soon Sykes began installing his equipment. The “Vibratory Units and the Chemicalized Respository” were located in an abandoned clubhouse and the “Detonary Compound” in a one-room, five-sided, windowless shed at the other end of the track. Sprouting from the roof of the clubhouse were two rods of shiny steel; inside were an old Ford Model-T engine serving as the Vibrator, an impressive mass of wires, batteries,
long rows of gaudy glass jars (probably filled with colored water), and a washtub full of evil-smelling chemicals. The shed looked like an ornate “cabalistic” pentagram covered with a spiderweb of wires. Padlocked doors and security guards confronted the curious. As described at the time by New Yorker racing columnist Audax Minor, “On the roof was a big five pointed star strung with radio aerial wire and festooned with ornaments from discarded brass beds and springs from box mattresses. The star always faces the way the wind blows” (41). Over the roof of the shed Sykes had constructed a small platform where he could stand to “direct magnetic impulses” and conduct the show.
The two buildings stood about a mile apart and were linked, as described by Stingo, by the “Ethereal Conduit upon which traveled with the speed of Light augmented 30,000-fold the initiatory Pulsations the Vibrator, and thence, via the antennae, to the natural Air Waves and channeled Coaxial Appendixtum” (42). The press played along for a while, publishing accounts of the mysterious equipment and reporting Sykes’s claim that he had “one of the most powerful radio installations in the Western Hemisphere,” which led local residents to wonder if static electricity generated by the equipment was interfering with their radio reception. A visit from representatives of the Federal Communications Commission revealed that to run his contraption, Sykes had “borrowed” some 32,400 kilowatts of electric power daily from the grid without the knowledge of Consolidated Edison; this resulted in local power failures and an official warning to Sykes not to do that again.
The weather remained fair and dry that week, save for a light mist on the final Saturday, and the Weather Control Bureau netted $8,000, with additional income derived from side contracts and bets, some with local mobsters. To celebrate, Mrs. Sykes threw a party for several hundred people at the Hotel Imperial in Manhattan, replete with chamber music, dancing long into the night, and endless bowls of Pisco Punch. All was well, but it did not end well. When reporters accused Sykes of just being lucky, he announced, perhaps after one too many drinks, that he would prove his power by throwing his machinery into reverse to produce torrents of rain between 2:30 and 4:30 on the next Monday afternoon. The odds were heavily against him; Stingo likened it to “breaking up a full house to draw for four of a kind.” It did not rain that afternoon, and a “deluge of derision” broke over Sykes and the Weather Control Bureau, resulting in the loss of pending future contracts at Belmont and Churchill Downs (47–48).40 Thus, according to Stingo, the rainmaker’s art was eclipsed, not to be revived for a score of years, next time not with old Ford motors, radios, and secret chemicals, but with airplanes, dry ice, and silver iodide (chapter 5).
Seeding the American West
Irving P. Krick (1906–1996) was a talented, charismatic “rainmaker” in both the business sense and the meteorological sense. The term that adheres most readily to him is “maverick.” Krick was a child prodigy on piano as well as a student of physics. After completing his doctorate in meteorology at Caltech, he helped establish the university’s Department of Meteorology, but he lacked a strong theoretical background. The program he developed emphasized the training of applied meteorologists, especially for the rapidly growing airline industry. Krick himself spent most of his time developing the Krick Weather Service, of Pasadena, California, using department space and weather bureau equipment. He specialized in speculative ultra-long-range forecasts, which the U.S. Weather Bureau considered doubtful. Krick gained a moment of fame by forecasting calm winds for the set of Gone with the Wind the night the burning of Atlanta was filmed. His forecasts were based on so-called analog methods using data from historic maps, which he codified for use with a simple slide-rule gadget. The forecasts were also tailored to be just what the client wanted to hear. Filmmakers favored rainfall, since they saved money on the days it rained and they did not shoot outside, so Krick provided them with “wetter” forecasts than normal. The hydropower company Edison Electric, on the contrary, preferred dry forecasts that favored water conservation in its dams, and Krick was glad to oblige by predicting clear skies for the company whenever he could.41
Krick’s use of analog forecasting techniques almost led to disaster in World War II, when, serving in the U.S. Army Air Force as one of six principal Allied forecasters tasked with predicting the date of the D-day invasion of Europe, he urged that the invasion proceed on June 5, when winds in the English Channel would have swamped the Allied invasion force. Ever the self-promoter, Krick later tried to take credit for the actual June 6 forecast, but more-balanced accounts indicate that the undertaking was truly a group effort, with Krick again playing the role of a maverick.42 The Norwegian meteorologist Sverre Petterssen (1898–1974), who was centrally involved, later expressed his opinion of the situation:
I knew Krick very well. In 1934 he had spent about two weeks with me in Bergen, [Norway] and in 1935, [when I was] a visiting professor at California Institute of Technology, I had worked with him for a period of four months. I considered him a very able, intuitive forecaster who could rise to considerable heights if he would dig deeper into the theoretical background of weather prediction.... However, wisely or unwisely, Krick took a liking to industrial applications and offered his services first to the film industry and later to any industry, anywhere. Krick’s main protector at Caltech was its President, Dr. Robert A. Millikan, who had organized U.S. weather efforts in the First World War. Millikan was a top level science advisor and confidant of General [H. H.] Arnold, the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Corps.... I knew that Krick, after a brief service in the U.S. Navy, had transferred to the Army Air Corps and that his long-range forecasting system had some kind of official sanction there. General Arnold saw to it that many of the senior air weather officers were sent to Krick to study his techniques.... I had little confidence in any system of mechanical selection of analogs and I thought it ... would not be difficult to look up the true meaning of the word “quackery” and then ignore the forecasts altogether.43
Krick returned to Caltech after the war, but, according to its former president Lee A. DuBridge, “everybody around the campus, and other meteorologists and other scientists around the country, said that Krick was a fake.” DuBridge wanted Krick’s department to deemphasize long-range forecasting and proprietary methods and to focus on “a real study of the physics of the atmosphere.” He ordered a review of Krick’s work by scientific elites Vannevar Bush, Karl Compton, and Warren Weaver, who concluded that Krick “claims to do things that he can’t do [and] claims to have done things he didn’t do.” About the same time, the weather bureau accused Krick of using its equipment on loan to Caltech for commercial gain. In 1948 DuBridge discontinued the meteorology program at Caltech and accepted Krick’s resignation, but Krick already had a new job, as a commercial rainmaker.44
Soon after the General Electric Corporation’s cloud-seeding experiments, Krick requested and received a set of GE reports on weather research. He followed with interest the saga of Project Cirrus and Irving Langmuir’s claims for the silver iodide generator in New Mexico (chapter 5). Krick visited GE in February 1950, seeking advice on the latest cloud-seeding technologies, but the visit was tense. He had been marketing his rainmaking projects out west by representing himself as having an unofficial relationship with GE, while dropping the names of Langmuir, Vincent Schaefer, and Bernard Vonnegut with his customers as if they were his close colleagues. When the science editor of the San Francisco Chronicle contacted GE in conjunction with a story he was planning on Krick’s rainmaking claims, he was informed that there was “no connection whatsoever” between Krick and GE, other than supplying him with background material as was done for many others.45
During the western drought of the early 1950s, Krick began cloud-seeding operations for large agricultural concerns. His clients included wheat farmers, ranchers, and stream-flow-enhancement projects on the Salt River in Arizona and the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest. In the latter project, Krick was credited by the Bureau of Reclamation with an 83 per
cent enhancement of the river flow, but the weather bureau considered this claim meaningless and sought to discredit him whenever possible. At the height of its operations, Krick’s company was conducting seeding operations covering 130 million acres of western lands, in all the areas where Charles Hatfield had operated (figure 3.5).46 By 1954 cloud seeding had been attempted in about thirty nations, including Australia, Canada, France, South Africa, Spain, Peru, and Israel, and that year a total of fifty-seven commercial cloud-seeding projects were under way in twenty-five states and territories, including Hawaii and Puerto Rico.47
Later, Krick snagged a contract to run silver iodide generators in Squaw Valley for the 1960 Winter Olympics and claimed that the deep snow pack was in part the result of his efforts. He remained active in ultra-long-range forecasting, expressing his belief in an orderly universe (and atmosphere) and the sorting out of its regularities through the use of analog methods and digital computers. Echoing a common sentiment about long-range prediction at the time (chapter 7), Krick proclaimed, “Give me enough time, men, and electronic computers and I’ll tell you the Newfoundland weather for 200 years from now.”48 He also claimed, echoing the surety and determinism of the famous mathematicians Gottfried Leibniz and Pierre-Simon Laplace, “If we had precise information back to the Ice Age, we could pinpoint the weather at 3:10 P.M. on March 11, 3004 in Tokyo”—a prediction no one would be around to verify.49 Although he said that he had voted for Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election, Krick offered a free (and lucky) long-range forecast for the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy: “fair, cold, and dry.” Controversy continued to follow Krick, however. He resigned from the American Meteorological Society (AMS) after being accused of making unsubstantiated claims for his forecasting methods and for violating the society’s code of professional ethics, but he rejoined in 1985, because, he said, he had outlived most of his enemies. His necrology in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society constitutes a study in understatement.50
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