Oh, Hail No

Acrylic on panel

9″ x 12″

Europe has a rich history of hail mitigation. Over the centuries strategies used include: burying red coral with laurel leaves in the vulnerable field, having four nude women lie down on the field with their legs raised, killing witches through various methods, making loud noises at oncoming storms, building bonfires, and much more. It did not take long following the invention of the cannon in the early 1300s to speculate that shooting at the sky would vanquish all sorts of malevolent weather.

At the end of the contraption-obsessed 19th century a handful of men turned their attention to creating an anti-hail device based on the principles of the physical sciences. The leading hypothesis was that shooting smoky vortex rings upward would disrupt the formation of hailstones by providing condensation nuclei around which moisture would bond and fall as rain prior to forming larger, icy hail. While at least 60 models of the anti-hail cannon were developed, they all shared the same general design: a mortar with a large cone at the mouth set atop a stand. While the basic designs pointed straight up, more sophisticated models could rotate and pivot. The length of the cone varied from a few feet to thirty feet. The ammunition (e.g. blackpowder) was to be shot every several seconds before the arrival of the storm and throughout its duration. Each blast resulted in a boom and whistle that could be heard across the rural landscape.

Around this time the regions of southern France and Germany, western Austria, and northern Italy in particular suffered substantial economic losses from hail damage to crops and especially vineyards. With so much at stake, farmers were willing to invest and believe in the promises of the cannon’s protection. By the end of 1900 there were over 10,000 hail cannons operating in northern Italy.

The development, adoption, and sudden demise of the anti-hail cannon can be traced through the proceedings of the four meetings of the International Congress on Hail Control that took place between 1899 and 1902. From the beginning, the larger scientific community found the proposed hypothesis of the cannon’s functionality dubious, though the efficacy was also difficult to conclusively disprove. The attendees of the first two Congresses were primarily individuals invested one way or another in the technology, whether they be farmers, inventors, or manufacturers. The 1900 Congress concluded with the assertion, “This Congress, after having heard the reports and successive discussions upon the results obtained during the year 1900, in Italy and in other countries, considers the great efficiency of shooting as a protection against hail as having been proved beyond all question.” The optimism attracted the attention of bureaucrats and scientists. Supported by institutional-scale methods, budgets, and scrutiny, the reports presented at the Third International Congress showed less promise. The Congress concluded further study was required, and the systems needed to be installed and operated properly and uniformly for the objective evaluation of their efficacy. Attendance to the Fourth Congress was exclusively extended to government officials and scientists. Again, they concluded further study was needed. The Austrian and Italian governments established controlled experiments, which were declared failures after two years of testing. The disastrous results lead to the complete abandonment of the anti-hail cannon.

Interest in hail mitigation revived following WW2 and the new opportunities its technological advancements produced. Predominantly focused in Italy, the novel approach involved shooting hundreds of rockets with explosives into the storm between 1,500 and 2,000m high. Again, it was difficult to draw any firm conclusions about the intervention’s impact on hail formation.

Concurrently in the United States, the General Electric Company was researching icing on aircraft. Ironically, they discovered that they could nucleate ice—that is create it, not destroy it—by introducing small particles into the air; silver iodide proved to be the most effective chemical for ice generating. However, its effectiveness when applied in the complex meteorological conditions of the planet remains questionable.

Today the desire to control the weather is alive and well. Modern electric hail cannons are in use (instead of powder they create shockwaves by exploding acetylene and oxygen), cloud seeding programs are active around the world, and nuclear bombs have been floated as solutions to hurricanes on more than one occasion.