The Weather Bureau's Secret Weapon
An Aberdeen inventor was caught with a bizarre, Gattling-gun-style contraption designed to blast the clouds away and control the rain.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
It was related last week how a daring Herald reporter peeked through a chink in the wall of an isolated house in the outskirts of the city; how he saw sights and heard sounds mysterious and strange. This 'dark mystery' has been explained. After a careful watch, a man was seen stealthily entering the cottage. The guard notified the city marshal and the Herald scribe, and the trio proceeded to the rendezvous. After a threat of breaking in, the door was opened to reveal Billy Mack. The room contained a workbench, a lathe, and the mysterious iron box. Mr. Mack explained his invention: 'Mack's Moisture Evaporator' is a conical-shaped iron box with blunderbuss barrels. It is intended to drive away fogs and regulate rainfall. The machine's mechanism is similar to a Gattling gun, using copper shells loaded with smokeless powder and an aluminum projectile containing an evaporating compound. When fired into clouds, the covering bursts, the compound is set free, and the clouds dissipate. Mr. Mack, who works for the weather bureau, had been 'cussed' for poor weather forecasts and decided to remedy it. He plans to sell the right to use the evaporator to counties, where commissioners would appoint 'rain-regulators' to fire volleys when sunshine is needed.
“No more will this fair land of ours be characterized as the home of the webfooter, but instead of clouds o'erhead the blue arch of heaven will spread its periphery to our grateful gaze.”
Billy Mack’s 'Moisture Evaporator' reflects the 19th-century obsession with mastering the wild Pacific Northwest weather through technological hubris. Today, cloud seeding remains a controversial and scientific evolution of this exact pioneer desire to force nature into human compliance.
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