“There seems to be a surfeit of H2O in this vicinity” John Steed (aka Patrick Macnee) to Mrs. Peel (aka Diana Rigg), The Avengers [episode 8, season 4].
On the highways leading into my home range these days, we’re seeing see more skis than kayaks sharing space with the omnipresent bike and gear carriers on locals’ vehicle roofs. New snow is beginning to soften ridgelines, and the ski resort just opened for the season, offering “some nice man-made snow” as one eager local diplomatically phrased it.
But I’m still holding out for enough of the real thing in the high country before I break out the cans of ski wax and strap on the old Rossignols. Leaving me with ample time, while eyeing the sky for signs of winter weather abuilding, to dream of powder days and blizzards past. Plenty of time to consider dreams and schemes to wring more moisture from passing clouds before they get away, also known as cloud seeding, rainmaking, cloudbusting, and in one multi-decade attempt at hurricane modification, Project STORMFURY…
Like most schemes to engineer weather, STORMFURY didn’t work quite as envisioned, but before we get to that here’s a quick dive into the physics of nucleation - the process that makes droplets from water vapor, and when the air is cold enough forms ice crystals around specks of solid material, what we know as snow when it comes to answer our wintry dreams. A process for seeding clouds with a catalyst (in this case carbon dioxide) was patented in 1891 by an inventor whose biggest successes were in howitzer and farm implement design, and by 1946, scientists working for General Electric were using dry ice to coax droplets from cold, humid air. Later that year, Bernard Vonnegut (a brother of novelist Kurt Vonnegut) first combined silver and iodide into a compound that induces freezing, i. e. - nucleation, and this is the process most often used today, in ongoing cloud-seeding programs around the world, with varying levels of perceived successes and failures. All pretty tame scientific territory so far, but there have been plenty of other schemers and dreamers to consider. History is littered with charlatans and shamans who arrived promising the end of drought in exchange for belief and bit of cash, and eventually left the scene with decidedly mixed results, but every now and again along comes a truly intriguing character.
I give you Austrian-born protégé of Sigmund Freud, correspondent of Albert Einstein, inventor of the Orgone Accumulator, serial philanderer, psychoanalyst/cloudbuster extraordinaire Dr. Wilhelm Reich. After early career researches in ‘orgastic potency’ and ‘electrophysiological discharge’ (you’ll have to look these up if curious), Dr. Reich became convinced that he had discovered an extension of Freud’s concept of ‘libido’ - ‘orgone energy’ that is omnipresent in the soil and air. In 1940 he built a box (orgone accumulator) to collect it, and to deliver it to lucky test subjects and patients eager for a little extra zing in their psycho/sexual skies. In 1951, Dr. Reich’s attentions shifted to “Cosmic Orgone Engineering” as he called it, and by 1953 he had built and tested dozens of Cloudbusters to unblock ‘orgone energy’ in the atmosphere and make it rain. In one test paid for by drought-stricken farmers in Maine, it began to rain after the Cloudbuster was fired up, according to an eyewitness account - but in 1956, suspecting the good doctor of medical fraud, the US Food and Drug Administration ordered the orgone accumulators be seized and destroyed, along with Dr. Reich’s books and papers mentioning orgone. He died in prison in early November of 1957, while serving a sentence for contempt of court and trying to convince authorities that he was not crazy, convinced that he had made great discoveries in science and psychiatry.
With Wilhelm Reich’s (arguably delusional) orgone dreams thus ended by a post-WWII, red-hunting, Cold War censorship frenzy, the cloudbusting field was now safe for the US military to begin shooting silver iodide and dry ice into hurricanes in an attempt to wring the power from the storm before it hit land, and to convince itself to seed clouds in an attempt to flood parts of North Vietnam. By 1965, some geniuses writing for the satiric British adventure/comedy series The Avengers had conflated themes of mad scientists, world domination, apocalyptic preaching, and demon grog into an episode best encapsulated by the immortal lines quoted at the beginning of this post - and yes, there is an ark in the episode.
Meanwhile, a more prosaic business of rainmaking has continued unabated, with perception of success and failure seemingly more a function of budget and desire than of scientific proof…
The US Bureau of Reclamation’s “Project Skywater,” a multi-decade effort to increase precipitation in the Upper Colorado River Basin and along the Sierra Nevada range.
NOAA got into the act with their own “Atmospheric Modification Program” (1979 - 1993)
Both were eventually cancelled due to questionable results and fears of liabilities for damages if success came with a vengeance, but a cursory exam of a Wikipedia entry on cloud seeding yields dozens more university and government funded attempts around the world to wring moisture from the sky.
Here’s a link to a recent story in the Colorado Sun, about an ongoing, multi-state effort to wring moisture from the clouds above the Rocky Mountains, before they get away to the High Plains and beyond.
…and I’ll leave you with a link to the music video Cloudbusting, pop singer Kate Bush’s 1985 romanticized homage to Dr. Wilhelm Reich’s 1950s-era dream. Up next, we’ll take a pictorial journey as a holiday offering, but for now I’m going out to eye the sky for snow clouds. Take care of yourselves, and help somebody out along the way. - B.