The idea that humans could summon rain at will is historically rooted to superstition, until modern cloud-seeding techniques demonstrated its practical potential. But for centuries, rain making efforts were limited to shamanic rituals including prayers to weather gods, dances and sacrifices. It wasn’t until the late 19th century, that efforts at weather modification became more persuasive.
In his 1841 work The Philosophy of Storms, American meteorologist James Pollard Espy proposed igniting large forest fires to generate enough heat to create convection currents. These rising air currents would carry moisture upward, where it would cool at higher altitudes and eventually fall as rain. Espy spent decades unsuccessfully lobbying Congress for permission to ignite fires along a 600-mile stretch from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.
Edward Powers, a former Civil War general, proposed a less destructive approach to inducing rain. In 1871, he published War and the Weather, in which he observed that heavy rainfall often followed battles involving intense artillery fire—an observation shared by many of his time. A decade earlier, J.C. Lewis expressed a similar idea in a letter later published in The American Journal of Science and Arts, reflecting on the heavy rains that followed the Battle of Bull Run: “The discharge of heavy artillery at contiguous points produces such a concussion that the vapor collects and falls generally in unusual quantities the same day or the day following.”
However, neither Powers nor Lewis were the first to associate loud sounds with rainfall. As early as the second century, Greek essayist Plutarch remarked, “Extraordinary rains pretty generally fall after great battles; whether it be that some divine power thus washes and cleanses the polluted earth with showers from above, or that moist and heavy evaporations, steaming forth from the blood and corruption, thicken the air.” Even Napoleon Bonaparte, whose defeat at Waterloo was significantly influenced by poor weather, believed there was a connection between heavy rain and the thunderous blasts of military weaponry.
Powers explained that most of the rainfall over North America originates from the evaporation of the Pacific Ocean. These moisture-laden water vapours travel overhead like invisible aerial rivers, releasing some of their moisture as precipitation along the way. He wrote:
Powers reasoned that by tapping into these huge reservoirs of atmospheric moisture, it might be possible to make the skies rain by artificial means.There must be streams of aqueous vapor flowing above us as great, in the volume of water they carry, as the rivers that convey back to the ocean the waters that fall to earth. Indeed, it is reasonable to believe that these aerial streams are vastly greater than are the rivers which they replenish, for not all the waters which they carry fall to the earth.
Nature has provided an abundance of water for refreshing our parched fields in times of drought, and has placed it within our reach. The sun is forever at work evaporating it for us from the Pacific, and in giving motion to the winds that bear it to us in never ending streams. It is for us to tap these streams and cause waters to fall when the means provided by nature to produce this result fail to act at proper times.
Drawing on the work of oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury, he explained that two major atmospheric currents—the warm, moisture-laden equatorial current and the cold polar current—flow high above in nearly opposite directions. When these opposing air masses interact, the moisture in the warm current condenses and falls as rain. Powers theorized that firing a large number of cannons could create concussive forces strong enough to trigger the mixing of these currents. To support his claim, he documented numerous historical battles where rainfall was observed shortly after the fighting ended.
“If lightning and thunder and rain have been brought on by the agency of man, when bloodshed and slaughter were only intended, this surely can be done without these latter concomitants,” he wrote, urging the U.S. Congress to fund research on the topic.
Powers found support from the U.S. Army Signal Office weather service and, through his representative Charles Farewell, proposed an ambitious plan: firing 300 cannons arranged in a mile-wide circle to induce rainfall. However, Congress showed little interest in the idea. It took twenty years before Farewell successfully secured a $9,000 congressional appropriation for rainmaking experiments.
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The project was overseen by Secretary of Agriculture Jeremiah Rusk, who appointed Robert G. Dyrenforth—a patent lawyer with a degree in mechanical engineering—as the lead investigator. Dyrenforth and his team of pyrotechnicians began their experiments by launching a 10-foot explosive-filled balloon over his country estate near Washington, D.C. While the test failed to produce any rain, it did provoke a complaint from William J. Rhees, chief clerk at the Smithsonian Institution, who reported that the explosion shook his house, alarmed his family, and terrified his “very fine Jersey cows.”
Eventually, Nelson Morris, a prominent Chicago meatpacker, invited Dyrenforth to his C Ranch near Midland, Texas to carry out further experiments. Morris offered to pick up local expenses and a nearby coal mine owner donated six kegs of blasting powder to support the effort.
At C Ranch, Dyrenforth built 60 homemade mortars, positioning them skyward at 45-degree angles. He also packed explosives into prairie dog and badger holes, forming what he called his "first line" of attack. Half a mile behind this setup, he established a second line composed entirely of large electrical kites, each roughly the size of a dinner table. Lacking enough personnel to fly them, Dyrenforth tied the kites to bushes, staggering them between the mortars. On a gently sloping prairie another half-mile beyond the kites, he arranged a final line featuring 10- and 20-foot-tall balloons along with the hydrogen apparatus needed to inflate them.
Dyrenforth’s party with inflated hydrogen balloons in Midland, Texas.
The first trial took place in the evening of August 9. The very next day, it rained heavily for two hours “causing water to run into the ‘draws’ and the plains to be drenched”. Dyrenforth estimated that about an inch of rain fell. However, he acknowledged that the Weather Bureau had already forecasted rain in the area, and he conceded that the explosions likely had no significant impact on the weather.
Smaller firings were conducted throughout August, producing little to no rain, though Dyrenforth noted frequent overcast skies.
On August 25, the sky was clear, and the ranchers noted that the weather was "settled dry," making it an ideal day for another round of firings. The team set off a series of explosions in the evening, finishing around eleven o'clock. Early the next morning, torrential rain began to fall as if the sky had suddenly opened up.
At about 3 o’clock on the following morning, August 26, I was awakened by violent thunder, which was accompanied by vivid lightning, and a heavy rainstorm was seen to the north—that is, in the direction towards which the surface wind had steadily blown during the firing, and hence the direction in which the shocks of the explosions were chiefly carried.
Dyrenforth reported further:
While the thin edge of the cloud was overhead, a few charges of dynamite were fired near the ranch house. A few moments after the first explosion the first overhead rain began, and after each subsequent explosion rain could be seen falling from the clouds overhead in what appeared to be a heavy shower.... After each explosion the quantity of rainfall increased.
Dyrenforth dispatched a promising report to Congress, but many officials from the Weather Bureau and meteorologists were sceptical. Professor Alexander McFarlane of the University of Texas wrote:
The trail of Friday, August 25, was a crucial test, and resulted not only in demonstrating what every person who has any sound knowledge of physics knows, that it is impossible to produce rain by making a great noise, but also that even the explosion of a twelve-foot balloon inside a black rain cloud does not bring down a shower.
Even Dyrenforth’s own meteorologist, George E. Curtis, was of the opinion “that these experiments have not afforded any scientific standing to the theory that rainstorms can be produced by concussions.”
Nevertheless, many, including Dyrenforth, continued to hold the belief that concussion experiments might still prove effective. When the mayor of El Paso, Texas, invited the rainmakers to test their methods in the arid desert town, Dyrenforth sent his team under the leadership of John T. Ellis to conduct experiments there.
Weather engineers and onlookers in El Paso watching the inflation of a balloon. Image credit: Harper’s Weekly
On September 18, the skies over El Paso reverberated with artillery fire. Ellis later reported, “A heavy dew had fallen during the night, an occurrence which, I am reliably informed, had never been known before in that region.”
He continued:
Soon after midnight rain had begun to fall within a few miles of El Paso, to the south and southeast, evidently coming from the clouds which had formed over the city, during the explosions, and, between midnight and morning, a heavy rainstorm had passed down the Rio Grande valley, copiously wetting the valley, including a few miles of the contiguous portions of Texas and Mexico.
From there, the team moved on to other locations such as Corpus Christi and San Diego, Texas, with similarly inconclusive results. In San Diego, the weather was already stormy when Ellis decided to fire upon the skies. Although most shells had no discernible effect, Ellis reported that one particularly powerful explosion was immediately followed by a downpour that lasted several minutes, drenching the party before they could reach shelter.
The rainmakers were convinced they had caused the rain, but newspapers and many agricultural and scientific journals ridiculed their efforts. The Nation criticized the government for wasting taxpayer money, mocking the idea that the explosion of a 10-foot hydrogen balloon could have any impact on aerial currents, comparing it to “the effect of the jump of one vigorous flea upon a thousand-ton steamship running at a speed of twenty knots.”
Similarly, Scientific American pointed out that meteorological records had already predicted rain in the areas where the experiments took place, suggesting that rain would have fallen regardless of Dyrenforth's balloon bombs.
Farm Implement News published a satirical cartoon, depicting Dyrenforth urging his technicians to launch the balloon bombs before the clouds naturally burst forth with rain.
“Hurry up the inflation, touch off the bombs, send up the kites, let go the rackarock; here’s a telegram announcing a storm. If we don’t hurry, it will be on us before we raise our racket”, Cartoon published in Farm Implement News, September 1891.
Despite the criticism, Dyrenforth continued to be the government’s rainmaker as he moved on to his next target, San Antonio. But the cloudless skies in San Antonio finally brought a halt to the Dryrenforth experiments, and stuck him with an irresistible nickname "Dryhenceforth."
Surprisingly, the concussion theory of rainmaking did not die with Dyrenforth’s unfruitful attempts. A decade later, breakfast cereal magnate Charles W. Post launched his own experiments in Texas’s Garza and Lynn counties. Over several hours, he detonated four-pound dynamite charges every four minutes. Post continued his experiments for four years, but unlike Dyrenforth, he ultimately concluded that the results were inconclusive. This marked the end of the concussion-based rainmaking era, but the science of weather modification was far from over.
In the same year that Dyrenforth was detonating aerial bombs, Lucien I. Blake of the University of Kansas proposed the radical dust theory for artificially inducing rain. He suggested that releasing dust and smoke into clouds could trigger precipitation, with the tiny particles serving as nuclei for ice crystals to form and raindrops to coalesce. This theory laid the foundation for what would later become known as cloud seeding. Unfortunately, Blake lacked the funding to test his idea. It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that the principles of cloud seeding were realized by American chemist and meteorologist Vincent Schaefer while researching aircraft icing for General Electric. Just four months later, Schaefer successfully caused snow to fall near Mount Greylock in western Massachusetts. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army used cloud seeding to extend the monsoon season, disrupting North Vietnamese military supplies by softening road surfaces and triggering landslides.
Today, cloud seeding is used by many countries as a strategic tool to address increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather patterns, including prolonged droughts that threaten water supplies and agriculture, as well as excessive rainfall that can lead to severe flooding and infrastructure damage.
References:
# Edward Powers, War and the weather
# Robert G. Dyrenforth, Letter from the Secretary of Agriculture in response to Senate resolution of February 23, 1892, transmitting the report of the agent of the Department of Agriculture for making experiments in the production of rainfall
# James Rodger Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control
# Politico Magazine, Congress’ Hare-Brained Scheme to Shoot Rain From the Skies
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