Fixing the Sky

by James Rodger Fleming

  After more than a year of struggles and setbacks, on July 8, 1924, a plane from Aberdeen carrying Warren’s equipment encountered an intense thunderstorm over the mouth of the Susquehanna River. The crew of two aviators reported: “Immediately following the attack [with 10 pounds of negatively charged sand] there was no more lightning or thunder, and a gentle rain of over one hour’s duration followed, purely local.”21 Warren claimed that this result was far from coincidental and that the plane’s intervention had upset the electrical balance of the storm. More intense lobbying followed. On October 30, 1924, two planes equipped with electrified sand dispensers conducted a demonstration over Washington, D.C. Warren sent messages to President Calvin Coolidge, members of his cabinet, and members of Congress to “watch” as the planes “attacked” the clouds over the city. There is no record from eyewitnesses, but Warren noted, “We scored a most deplorable failure, as not a thing happened” (5). Disappointed but not deterred, Warren moved his operations closer to Washington, to Bolling Field. Less than a month later, Time reported a subsequent set of successful sanding demonstrations over Washington. Captain L. I. Eagle and Lieutenant W. E. Melville flew their De Havilland airplanes to an altitude of 13,000 feet, where they “shot down” a series of cumulus clouds with a barrage of electrified sand. As the planes circled overhead, a clearing opened up. “A miracle!” cried some of the watchers.22 Still, although Warren had busted clouds, he had not yet cleared a fog or made it rain. Positive press clippings notwithstanding, Warren and his A. R. Company had not earned a penny on his invention, and Bancroft was still writing the checks.

  Round 3: Hartford, Connecticut

  To save money and to be closer to home, Warren moved his operation yet again in 1925, this time to the municipal airfield in Hartford, Connecticut. On the basis of his rather meager successes in busting up fair-weather clouds—fortythree successes and twenty-six failures in six years—he again petitioned for research support from the army, navy, and post office. Warren argued that he needed access to better airplanes that would be capable of reaching the very tops of the clouds, “so that the rays of the sun will freely strike the walls of the wide gashes cut in flight ... and the electric action of our sand ... will be reinforced and energized many fold by the radiant energy of the rays of the sun.”23 The army and navy awarded him a grant of $15,000 and the services of some of its pilots, but provided no new airplanes or equipment. Warren thought he deserved more.

  Alexander McAdie witnessed the trials in Hartford and noted that the planes had cleared a “figure 8” in the sky with their device—this, two decades before General Electric announced a similar accomplishment using dry ice.24 Warren was quick to claim success. He telegraphed Bancroft that he had “knocked the stuffings out of two small clouds,”25 but this was not news; he had claimed this five years earlier. With time running out on the grant, Warren told the press in October, “Our work here is finished.... We have clearly proved our theories concerning the art of making it rain through the use of airplanes and are now in position to perfect our apparatus and equipment.”26 But he added, “There are many things yet to be done.” Warren admitted that the atmosphere following his cloud-busting test flights had “an uncanny and hard to describe look, effervescent, like dissolved gas escaping under high pressure, or the sudden escape of steam, rolling and tumbling until it quickly disappears.”27 The press, previously enthusiastic, was now turning skeptical. Warren worried that the news stories coming out were surrounded with a halo of unreality, “as wizard or witchdoctor type of news—this needs to be debunked” (17). He could have well said that his own nebulous ideas needed to be debunked. The world’s verdict to date was “not proven” (16).

  The Business of “Rainmaking”

  Ever the businessman, Warren summarized his accomplishments, frustrations, and fantasies in a pamphlet, Fact and Plans: Rainmaking—Fogs and Radiant Planes (1928). Here he opined that “once rainmaking is mastered” through good high-tension engineering, “the wealth and prosperity arising from increased production, and decreased cost of living, will reach figures almost ‘beyond the dreams of avarice,’ not only for our country but for the entire world” (16). With no further prospects for support from the military, it seemed that he would have to realize his dream by raising private capital. But so far, the only investor was Bancroft. Warren’s business plan (or vision) included a fleet of airplanes to clear pollution, relieve drought, and suppress forest fires. Clients could be cities, farmers, government agencies, railways, and steamship lines. The London Chamber of Commerce estimated that dense fog cost the city £1 million a day (and he promised he could clear it out in a day). To undertake contracts like this, he proposed the formation of the Warren Company, incorporated in Delaware with 100,000 shares at $8, with four airplanes, two assistants, a machine shop, and a lab, “Warren and his two assistants to devote their entire time, to the exclusion of all else, to the work in hand for at least one year, without salary or expense charges to the company, until the work is satisfactorily completed” (23).

  Looking further to the future, Warren waxed philosophical about the possibility of constructing a radiant (ionized) metal plane charged to a potential of 100,000 volts. He wrote that such a plane would operate on what Sir William Crookes had called a fourth state of “radiant matter”: “Such a radiant plane will decompose the aqueous vapor immediately in contact with it, creating ozone ... and the hydrogen, nitrogen, helium, argon, neon, krypton, xenon, etc. or the rare and inert gases will be repelled and forced away, through electric radiation” (10–11). By creating its own partial vacuum, “the resistance to the flight of the plane [would be] reduced to a minimum” and the plane would set new speed records. Pure fantasy! But wait, there’s more: Warren wrote that the electric charge would also de-ice the plane so it could fly in bad weather, and the ozone could be collected and used on board “for the benefit of the engines and passengers.” A radiant plane would repel and efface everything in nature, “including the frictional action of high winds, storms, tornadoes, cyclones, etc.” (11). It could fly at any height in the coldest, iciest conditions; consume less fuel; and attain great speeds. With no drag from the air, the plane would have increased buoyancy, flying on a cushion of highly electrified air. It would be more easily handled and controlled, “immune from all of nature’s attacks.” The title page of Warren’s Facts and Plans is marked “Strictly Confidential, Not for General Circulation.” The inside cover of Bancroft’s personal copy was inscribed by the author: “Kindly keep in your own possession; Sent with supreme confidence in the unexpected; Don’t Worry.”

  But Bancroft did worry; he had lost confidence in Warren. His enthusiastic partner, who likened his situation to the struggles of other famous inventors (Morse, Bell, and Marconi), had a tendency to blame others for lack of progress. Warren blamed the equipment, the hired help, government red tape, his poor health, even interservice rivalries for his shortcomings; however, he never doubted his theory. Bancroft had invested tens of thousands of his own dollars in the fog-clearing and rainmaking project, but after eight years he had little to show for it—only some minor cloud-busting demonstrations, Warren’s promises, and worthless shares of stock. By 1927 Bancroft had decided that it was time to cut his losses—and his losses ran deep. Rumor has it that to cover his investments, he even sold a copy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address given to the family by his grandfather. Warren reacted to Bancroft’s pullout with shock and dismay, and then with recriminations of his own, going all the way back to the Dayton experiments, when, he said, Bancroft had “injured rather than helped the cause” with his aloofness and air of superiority. There is evidence that as late as February 1929, Warren was still hanging on, trying to persuade aviation moguls to fund him, trying to issue stock for a new company, and, unbelievably, still trying to solicit money from Bancroft.28 There the trail fades away, possibly obliterated by the stock market crash, but there is ample material in the Bancroft Papers on this and other ventures to reward a potenti
al biographer. In 1938, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his college graduation, Bancroft wrote to his Harvard classmates: “Owing to my lifelong habit of being a minority of one on all occasions, my research work does not look convincing to most people. Since I have become avowedly a specialist in unorthodox ideas in the last decade the situation is getting worse, because now I irritate more people.”29 In addition to the electrified sand episode, he was referring to questions raised by the medical community concerning his excursion into the supposed colloidal chemistry of the human nervous system and his theory of anesthesia. In other episodes, Bancroft’s attempts to articulate a general chemical explanation of poisoning, drug addiction, alcoholism, and insanity, and his fumbling, and some say unethical, experiments with human subjects brought him into direct conflict with the larger research community and damaged his scientific reputation. There was more to it than just electrified sand.

  Fog Research at MIT

  “Fog dissipating has, on the one hand, attracted the attention of crack-pot inventors, and on the other, occupied the minds of sober, able investigators. So it is that there have been visionary grandiose ideas of ridding harbors and airports alike of fog. The scale of operations implied together with the lack of factual data relating to fog as a physical entity have at once fascinated the untrammeled mind of the wild inventor and harassed the mind of the cautious investigator.”30 This was written in 1938 by Edward L. Bowles, director of the Round Hill Research Division at MIT and supervisor of its fog research.

  Undoubtedly, MIT meteorologist Henry Garrett Houghton Jr. (1905–1987) considered himself a “cautious investigator” engaged in fog research, and most certainly he regarded Warren as a “wild inventor.” The theoretical processes involved in precipitation formation—the Wegener-Bergeron-Findeisen ice crystal process (in cold clouds) or the collision-coalescence process (in warm clouds)—had only recently been defined. In 1935, working on the basis of research done by Alfred Wegener, Norwegian meteorologist Tor Bergeron published his hypothesis that the growth of ice crystals in a cloud containing both ice and water droplets could lead to precipitation; three years later, Walter Findeisen clarified and expanded on Bergeron’s ideas.31 The key to fog removal seemed to lie in the reversing of these processes.

  In 1938 Houghton and his colleague W. H. Radford surveyed the various approaches to fog removal and categorized them as physical, thermal, or chemical removal methods. Here is a synopsis of his report:

  • Physical methods. One imaginative approach to freeing airfields from fog involved the installation of powerful fans and ventilation ducts beneath the runways to provide a fresh-air circulation system. This technique would not work, however, if the airport was covered by a large fog bank and the fans merely circulated moist air. Another plan envisioned forcing a stream of air through a set of baffles to slow it down and to condense some of the moisture on contact, but such an apparatus would likely be huge, inefficient, and impractical.

  What about high-intensity sound waves? Experiments had demonstrated that they could clear the air of smoke and dust. The theory was that the energy generated by the sound echoing off the walls of a small, enclosed space triggered the precipitation of suspended matter in the air. But an airport is not a tabletop experiment. It is not an enclosed space. Fog particles in the free air are much larger than smoke or dust particles, and air travelers and airport neighbors could not safely or pleasantly be subjected to high-intensity sound waves every time the fog rolled in.

  What about electricity? Warren’s technique of sprinkling electrically charged sand above fog or clouds should, in theory, lead to the coalescence of the cloud droplets. In practice, however, it was fraught with practical problems and had met with only limited success. Alternatively, spraying charged water drops might also be effective, but could result in the formation of additional fog. An electrical precipitator—long used for removing smoke, dust, and fumes from industrial gases—could be adapted to fog removal, but a medium-size airport installation might require a huge elevated plate suspended some 32 feet above the ground, with a potential difference between plate and ground of 6 million volts. Woe to anyone or anything that short-circuited this apparatus!

  • Thermal methods. It was well known at the time that supplying heat directly to the atmosphere by burning fuel (discussed in detail later) was a simple, brute-force method of dissipating fog. This technique, however, required an immense amount of energy, since water has such a large latent heat of evaporation. The apparatus (open fires, electric grids, blasts of air or steam) would be large and cumbersome and would probably constitute a dangerous obstruction at an airport. Another approach, using selective absorption of infrared radiation to heat the water vapor and carbon dioxide in the air, lay beyond the capability of current (1938) technology. It was of theoretical interest, however, since it required no cumbersome airport installations, just a properly designed invisible heat ray to zap the fog at a distance.

  • Chemical methods. Houghton’s own research program focused on the physical and radiative properties of condensation, fog, and clouds. His experiments involved the use of calcium chloride as a chemical drying agent, which he sprayed from an array of pipes installed over an airfield. Other possible substances, most with undesirable side effects, included silica gel, sulfuric acid, and certain strong alkalis. For example, calcium oxide (quicklime) releases heat when it reacts with atmospheric carbon dioxide and water vapor, but it is a caustic substance that causes eye and skin irritation and requires proper storage and handling to avoid spontaneous combustion. Thus it was deemed not suitable for field operations involving aircraft.32

  Houghton was born in New York City and attended high school in Newton, Massachusetts. He was educated at Drexel (B.S. 1926) and MIT (S. M. 1927), receiving his degrees in electrical engineering. From 1928 to 1938, he served on the staff of MIT’s Round Hill Research Division, where he and Bowles investigated the behavior of small water droplets as they formed and evaporated, measured the transmission of visible light through fog, and developed chemical techniques for fog dissipation. Houghton became an assistant professor of meteorology at MIT in 1939 and directed the department as associate professor and executive officer (1942–1945) and professor and head (1946–1970). During World War II, Houghton trained weather officers and served on a number of national boards and military committees. After 1945, he chaired the meteorology panel of the Pentagon’s Joint Research and Development Board, served on the science advisory board of the Commanding General of the Air Force, and was the first board chairman of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), in 1959. He also sustained a lifelong interest in weather control. In 1951, in conjunction with the American Meteorological Society, he prepared an appraisal of cloud seeding as a means of increasing precipitation, contributed to discussions about weather warfare (chapter 6), and in 1968 published a review of precipitation mechanisms and their artificial modification in the Journal of Applied Meteorology.33

  A story in Time in 1934 described a test of Houghton’s chemical “fog broom,” conducted at the private airfield of eccentric millionaire Colonel Edward Howland Robinson Green on his Round Hill estate overlooking Buzzards Bay. Houghton had erected a large scaffold across the runway to support a maze of piping and nozzles, “patterned after the business end of a skunk,” that he claimed offered “the first practically-tested way of artificially dissipating fog over local areas” (figure 4.5). As a bank of thick fog rolled in from the ocean, Houghton powered up his “secret” apparatus. As the Time reporter described it, “Centrifugal pumps sent a high-pressure stream of liquid through the overhead pipe. Its nozzles hissed, and jets of Mr. Houghton’s chemical cut into the fog like rapiers. The white sea seemed to divide, roll back like the Red Sea before Moses. Soon the watchers were looking through a half-mile tunnel of clear air, 30 feet high, 100 feet wide.”34

  4.5 Henry G. Houghton standing on the chemical fog dissipation apparatus at the MIT research station near South Dar
tmouth, Massachusetts. Colonel Edward Howland Robinson Green’s mansion and the mast of a whaling ship can be seen in the background. (NATIONAL ARCHIVES PHOTO 27-G-1A-8–48)

  Houghton’s research supported the goals of military chemists who were seeking effective smoke screen agents and possible chemical neutralizing agents for use during poison gas attacks. He learned that titanium or zinc chloride could be used in generating smoke screens, but calcium chloride (CaCl2) acted as a hygroscopic drying agent, or desiccant. Calcium chloride is a non-toxic exothermic compound that lowers the freezing point of water. It is used as a water softener, to suppress dust on dirt roads, to melt ice, and as a drying agent in concrete. It can be used as a food preservative, but can also be a powerful abrasive irritant on moist skin tissue and in the eyes, nose, mouth, throat, and lungs. When burned, it produces toxic and corrosive fumes. It attacks zinc in the presence of water to form highly flammable hydrogen gas, and it corrodes steel rebar. Experiments conducted in a laboratory cloud chamber indicated that 1 gram of calcium chloride could clear 3 cubic meters of foggy air, possibly by lowering the vapor pressure of water. Houghton hoped his chemical sprays might be used to clear fog at airports and to add a margin of safety for ocean liners using it to sweep their paths clear. He had basically designed a huge chemical dehumidifier.35

  Working against the practical adoption of this technique was the enormous amount of chemical needed to keep open even a moderate-sized hole in the fog. Since the ocean fog kept rolling in and re-forming, a constant chemical spray of about 400 pounds a second (!) would have been needed to maintain a half mile opening during the Round Hill experiment. Moreover, as the researchers admitted, “Apparatus of the type described cannot readily be made portable and its size makes it a rather serious obstruction for some applications, notably at airports.” As mentioned, the electrified, high-pressure calcium chloride spray was corrosive to metals. It tended to clog the spray nozzles and had to be washed off any metal objects it contacted, especially electrical systems, but also the piping and even the airplanes and ships it was designed to serve. It was also dangerous to personnel, producing skin rashes if not rinsed off, and it killed vegetation (it was sold as a weed killer). The navy had some unfortunate experiences with the chemical and ultimately decided not to use it on its airplane carriers.36