Fixing the Sky (26 page)

The view from the cockpit was especially exhilarating. Although airmen were thankful for the safety that FIDO provided, they described their first experiences of landing between FIDO burners as frightening. One veteran pilot, echoing Clarke's description, likened it to a descent into hell, remarking that it seemed as if he “was over [the enemy] target once more ... [and] that the whole place must have caught on fire.”
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FIDO actually worked. It allowed British and Allied aircraft to take off and land in conditions of poor visibility when the Germans were grounded (figure 4.6). The urgency that Churchill demanded had been met, and FIDO was quickly serving the duty of guiding RAF and Allied airmen home safely. Pilots returning to foggy England after a mission could see the airfield glowing in the distance, beckoning them home to a lighted, fog-free airport. They could also save valuable time getting their shot-up planes and exhausted (and possibly wounded) crews on the ground. Because of FIDO, the Allies could launch patrols and air raids and return their planes safely when enemy
aircraft were grounded due to poor visibility. RAF Coastal Command aircraft on anti–U-boat patrol used FIDO frequently. On one occasion, a lost Lysander aircraft landed on a runway that had been cleared of fog. When FIDO was turned off, fog once again enveloped the aircraft. Reportedly, the pilot wandered across the tarmac for quite some time before finding the control tower.

4.6 Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, 493rd Bomb Group, landing in England with the aid of FIDO, November 16, 1944. Note the giant flames behind the airplane. (NATIONAL ARCHIVES PHOTO A9004, DETAIL)

The success of FIDO was presented to a war-weary public as almost a miracle. Newspapers proclaimed it as a lifesaver and a triumph for British aviation. Those involved in administering the project credited FIDO with shortening the war and saving the lives of up to 10,000 airmen. Military historians are fond of invoking “the fog of war” as they struggle to reconstruct events. In the case of England, the fog was literal. An ice fog persisted during the opening days of the Battle of the Bulge, when FIDO supported Allied aviation. But during the long campaign, the weather cleared and much of the tactical air support came from the Continent, not England. Thus contemporary evaluations of the overall success of FIDO in “shortening the war” may have been somewhat optimistic and self-serving.
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FIDO proved to be one of the innovation success stories of World War II. It was a crash research program that became operational; it saved lives and equipment; and it definitely gave the edge to Allied aviation during the last two years of the war. But FIDO was feasible only under the desperate conditions of wartime. Bomber Command, its chief beneficiary, credited it with introducing a “revolutionary change in the air war,” but its success was never replicated. When the FIDO system was ignited at an airfield, up to
6,000 gallons
of gasoline were burned during the time required to land one aircraft. By comparison, a Mosquito bomber might burn between 10 and 20 gallons of fuel during its landing approach. It is estimated that during the two and a half years that FIDO was in operation, airfields that used it consumed a total of 30 million gallons of gasoline. Such expenditures were justifiable only when national survival was at stake. Ironically, FIDO's success was due in large part to the brilliant but modest British defense engineer Guy Stewart Callendar, who was the first scientist to attribute the enhanced greenhouse effect to the burning of fossil fuels, who designed key components of the system (including the trench burners), and who was one of the patent holders on the massive FIDO fuel burner.
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After the war, a FIDO system was planned for London's Heathrow Airport, but it was never installed. For a time, FIDO systems were maintained at the Blackbushe and Manston RAF bases, but according to one 1957 estimate, the cost of running a FIDO installation was prohibitively expensive—₤44,500 an hour. Experiments using jet engines installed along runways to heat and disperse fog at Orly Airport near Paris and in Nanyuan, China, met with mixed results. The main technique for dealing with fog, developed after the war, was not weather or cloud modification but the widespread use of instrumented landing techniques.
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On July 11, 1934, Willis R. Gregg, chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau, presided over the dedication ceremony at the air-conditioned house at the Century of Progress World's Fair in Chicago. It was the Midwest's hottest summer to date, with temperatures that day in St. Louis reaching 100°F (38°C), but Chicago, cooled by a breeze from Lake Michigan, reached only a moderate 82°F (28°C). It was a dust bowl year, with little rain and the average regional temperatures soaring 5 to 10 degrees above normal. Gregg's theme, broadcast over NBC Radio, was weather control, and he began by discounting the “fantastic methods” of the professional
rainmakers “who have boasted of their abilities to end drouths by the simple expediency of setting off a few explosives,” or of those charlatans who “would mount receptacles containing small quantities of chemicals on poles or platforms in the vicinity of the drouth stricken areas, and then trust to the law of averages and Old Mother Nature to come through with rain at the psychological moment so they may collect rain-making fees.”
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He deemed the prospects for controlling outdoor weather “rather slim” for a great many centuries to come.

Gregg's focus was on the control of indoor weather, on display that day in the air-conditioned house, where there was “no necessity for suffering from weather discomforts.” Of course, indoor air-conditioning really began before recorded history, when people sought shelter from the storm to keep them dry and warm. Roofs, doors, windows, screens, fireplaces, stoves, and furnaces function either to keep out undesirable elements like rain, wind, and pests or to allow in or provide desirable elements such as shade, light, and heat. In hot climates, traditional practices of ventilation and evaporative cooling have long served to moderate heat, if not moisture. The inner atmosphere of the show house of 1934, however, had been refrigerated and dehumidified by mechanical means, the science of thermodynamics, the engineering that has come to be known as HVAC, and the power supplied by electricity. According to Gregg, conditioning this indoor air was solving “the one thing that actually has the most lasting effect upon the human body and human activity—weather, if only in a small way.”
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Gregg, speaking from the front porch of the house, speculated about the possible, if impracticable, project of refrigerating an entire city mechanically, but he did point out, prophetically, that air-conditioning would allow cities to expand in areas formerly considered too hot for comfort. He might be amazed today to see air-conditioned mega-malls and domed stadiums, but not really, since even then air-conditioning was becoming more and more popular. On his inspection tour out west, through the dust bowl region, Gregg, at least on occasion, traveled on air-conditioned trains, slept in air-conditioned hotels, and ate in air-conditioned restaurants. He spoke of air-conditioning in relief of hay fever and of living in it from cradle to grave, citing the hospital incubators supporting the Dionne quintuplets, born in May of that year in Canada, and the growing trend for air-conditioned funeral parlors. His weather bureau office in Washington, D.C., however, was not air-conditioned; it had high ceilings and fans that helped alleviate the oppressive heat somewhat. The federal government followed liberal leave policies during heat waves.

But what about the outside air? In the summer of 1938, Gregg sent letters to his colleagues asking them to speculate on what the meteorological profession might look like in fifty years. Most of the responses focused on scientific and technological advances in forecasting. Some emphasized the growing importance of upper-air
measurements using radiosondes and broadcasts that would allow “records to be flashed to all parts of the world.” Charles Franklin Brooks foresaw remote sensing of the atmosphere using ultra-high-frequency radio transmissions. J. Cecil Alter suggested that “sky-sweeping robots of electric eyes will explore the upper atmosphere for air mass demarcations, depths, direction and velocity movement, moisture content, and other factors. Zigzag tracings or photographic replicas, automatically registered, will be made of the shape of the course of the refracted ray from the electric eye, as it passes through different air masses.”
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Humphreys wrote of “robot reporters—instruments that not only keep a continuous record of the weather elements, but which, at the touch of a button, or automatically at regular intervals, also tell all about the weather there at the time” (215). These predictions were largely realized through the development of weather radar and other forms of remote sensing. Also, in 1939, George W. Mindling foretold, in doggerel, of the “coming perpetual visiontone show” of perfect surveillance and perfect prediction using television and infrared sensors, a technology instituted in the TIROS (Television Infrared Observation Satellite) meteorological satellite program in 1960:

These lines in Mindling's poem are preceded by seven stanzas praising the radiosonde and followed by two stanzas anticipating that weather forecasting might someday attain the accuracy of astronomical predictions.

Two of Gregg's respondents spun wild fantasies involving geoengineering. Major E. H. Bowie of the San Francisco weather bureau office facetiously suggested that the only way to end the dust bowl was through a Works Progress Administration project to lower the height of the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains. T. A. Blair of Lincoln, Nebraska, issued this ominous forecast for a weather control agency and a “war for the control the air masses,” a full century into the future:

Representative of the attitudes of the era was Charles William Barber's 1943 illustration of the curtain of “weather superstitions and fallacies” being drawn aside to reveal the progressive path of weather science leading to its ultimate goals (figure 4.7). Perhaps, however, accurate long-range forecasting and weather control are the
real
weather superstitions and fallacies.

I am writing this book in Maine, in the summer, under a tree, without air-conditioning. I do not have it in my office, and I do not need it in my home. With a basement dehumidifier, window screens, fans, and a lake conveniently nearby, I have no need at all to be sequestered from the open air. In fact, I found creative writing to be nearly impossible while on sabbatical, cooped up as I was in the elegant air-conditioned buildings of Washington, D.C. There I focused on doing library and archival research, giving and attending seminars, and otherwise broadening my horizons while avoiding the heat of the day. It seems to me that climate deliberations in the U.S. capital will be conducted indoors, in air-conditioned buildings sequestered from the summer heat of Washington. Some of the people making the decisions might even be advocates for a Weather Distributing Administration.