HAIL in Ireland is a mere temporary inconvenience. In parts of Central Europe, however, particularly in the mountainous regions towards the centre of the continent, it can be much more serious. Many places are subject to severe and frequent hail storms, and large lumps of ice often strip the leaves from vines, batter crops and cereals to useless pulp and cause irremediable damage to young citrus fruits. In years gone by it was no uncommon thing for a peasant to see a whole year's livelihood swept away in the space of half an hour.
Austrian vignerons found themselves in such a fix a century ago and, after a few bad seasons, their mood resembled that of Claudius as he tried to put a stop to the interfering antics of his stepson Hamlet:
Diseases desperate grown,
By desperate appliance are relieved,
Or not at all.
Anything, they felt, that might avert disaster from their grapes was more than worth a try, and so they took enthusiastically to grelifugues.
In spring 1897, Albert Stiger, burgomeister of the little Austrian town of Windish Feistritz, resurrected what was, in fact, a very old technique. His idea was that by discharging a piece of artillery at a thundercloud, any hail that lurked within would be suppressed a notion, it must be said, that has no scientific provenance, either then or since. Stiger's grelifugue "that which compels the hail to run away" - was an upward pointing gun some 6 ft high, resembling a slender funnel or a large upright megaphone of the kind on which the dog of old used to listen for "His Master's Voice".
A grelifugue discharged produced a power of noise and it seemed to stop the hail! After two hail free Windish Feistritz summers, Stiger's fame spread rapidly around the continent, and by 1899 no fewer than 2000 grelifugues were operating.
But meteorologists, as they so often are, were sceptical. In 1902 they descended on Windish Feistritz like the Inquisition, and precise experiments were carried out. As it happened, during the period of their tests, all "protected" sites were visited repeatedly by heavy and destructive hail storms, the guns were thus discredited, and meteorologists proclaimed their epitaph: "For all scientific purposes, and indeed for all objectively thinking agriculturists, the matter is settled; we are justified by the total failure of the experiment in saying that the fate of `weather shooting' and the grelifugue has now been scale."