Karl Marx used to complain: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it!" The same could be said of meteorologists.
They have become adept at knowing how the atmosphere works and highly skilled at anticipating its myriad eccentricities; but their attempts to control the elements have always met with failure.
This is not surprising. The energy involved in even the most localised of atmospheric phenomena is on a scale almost unknown in normal human activities. A summer thunderstorm, for example, lasting only half an hour, releases as much energy as the burning of 7,000 tonnes of coal.
It is obviously impossible to apply energy to the atmosphere on this scale in any controlled way, even if it were desirable to do so and the results could be foreseen. All we can hope to achieve by way of changing the weather is to provide a catalyst to initiate a process which is just on the point of happening anyway, but which might not otherwise have taken place. This was what Robert St George Dyrenforth tried to do.
Dyrenforth was a tall, debonair ex-army officer who had qualified in law. He claimed to be able to produce abundant rain over drought-stricken areas by sending explosives aloft in a balloon. When the explosives were detonated they created, according to Dyren forth, "something in the nature of a vortex, or of a momentary cavern, into which the condensed moisture is drawn from afar, after which the explosion may squeeze the water out of the air like a sponge".
He was so successful in promoting this extraordinary theory that in 1891 the US Congress voted him $2,000 to carry out experiments.
The trials took place in the late summer and autumn of that year in Midland, Texas. By coincidence, the first attempt on August 6th produced a healthy deluge, and others in succeeding weeks appeared to meet with moderate success. The newspapers were most impressed: "They Made the Rain," the Rocky Mountain News proclaimed in banner headlines. Dyrenforth, for a little while, was a celebrity.
Unfortunately, subsequent experiments produced no rain at all. As a last attempt, 180 shells and 1,200 small explosives contained in 12 balloons were detonated simultaneously, but as reported by the Washington Post, "The whole hullabaloo did not lead to any more water than would furnish a canary bird with its morning bath".
Dyrenforth was pilloried and satirised as "Dryhenceforth"; wisely, he returned to the practice of the law and relative obscurity.