Making it Rain With Dynamite on a Kite
Forget rain dances. Ever consider shooting explosives into the air?
But this didn’t stop Grape Nut inventor C.W. Post from attempting to do so.
Before his cereal-manufacturing gig took off (and after a debilitating mental breakdown) Post moved to Texas with hopes of creating an intentional utopian community. When this idea failed, he got a foot into the cereal biz. He also began thinking about rain.
Post remembered hearing tales of the torrential downpours that followed heavy battle during the Napoleonic Wars. And he heard word from old Civil War soldiers that rain often succeeded heavy cannon fire. So, with this explosives = rain equation in mind, he set to work, hoping that one day, human-induced rain might replace traditional systems of irrigation.
And wouldn’t that be just peachy? Imagine a quick fix to a drought-striken California found in a beautiful firework-like display of booms and cracks that light up the sky.
He blasted 24,000 pounds of dynamite into the air. Onlookers reported that a refreshing sprinkle did, in fact, follow.
But Post’s plan didn’t work quite as well as he had hoped. In his first rain experiment, conducted in 1910, Post adhered two pounds of dynamite to a kite. He flew the kite into the air, ignited it, and was surprised to find that the skies didn’t immediately open up above him. But this didn’t stop him from continuing to test out his hypothesis in a five year, $50,000 bender that he termed his “rain battles.”
According to Post, seven out of his 13 attempts to make it rain were a success. In the most intense of these attempts, he blasted 24,000 pounds of dynamite into the air and onlookers reported that a refreshing sprinkle did, in fact, follow.
This isn’t the only instance in history where humans have endeavored to make it rain. Consider pluviculturist Charles Hatfield, who mixed together 23 secret chemicals, which he claimed would induce rain, in an attempt to fill San Diego’s Morena Dam reservoir. And rain, it did — the city got so much rain that The Lower Otay Dam eventually broke and the city flooded. More recently, there’s the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where the Chinese sent over 1,000 silver iodide rockets into the air in hopes that any rainfall hiding in the skies would drop before the beginning of the opening ceremony.
Whether humans can actually control the weather is up for debate. History has certainly seen some successes in the realm of making it rain. Skeptics argue that these folks were just extraordinary at predicting the weather, or simply, that they were lucky: that the rain fell by coincidence. But if you’re looking to produce the rainstorm of your dreams, blasting lots of dynamite into the air just might give you better results than a rain dance.
Follow us
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].by Rebecca Katzman, Modern Farmer
December 26, 2014
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreExplore other topics
Share With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
SubmitNecessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and are used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies.