Soldiers who had fought in the Civil War remembered that heavy rain often followed a big artillery bombardment. In the early 1890s the Army tried to turn the memory into science. Experiments at Midland began at least as early as 1891 under Gen. Robert St. George Dyrenforth, who sent up explosive balloons and fired artillery to "break the balanced state" of the air and set rain clouds building. Congress and the Department of Agriculture paid for the work, which ended inconclusively after a single season.
The concussion theory
The rainmakers moved on to El Paso, then short of water, with no better luck. Robert J. Kleberg hired the team for the King Ranch, and heavy rain did come there, though few scientists would credit the explosions. Late in 1892 the team began a new series at Camp Farwell, near San Antonio. No rain came, and Robert MacFarlane, a physicist at the University of Texas, declared both the experiment and the theory faulty.
C. W. Post tried anyway. The Battle Creek maker of Postum and Grape-Nuts had bought some 225,000 acres along the Caprock escarpment in Garza and Lynn counties in 1906 and begun Post City the next year. In the early 1910s he ran his own experiments there. From firing stations along the rim of the Caprock, four-pound charges of dynamite went off every four minutes for hours at a time. He spent thousands of dollars, the results stayed inconclusive, and by 1914 the trials had stopped. The Handbook of Texas calls it apparently the final blow to the concussion theory.
Seeding the sky
The new method came out of a General Electric laboratory in New York in the mid-1940s, when Vincent Schaefer found that dry ice could make ice crystals form in certain clouds, and Bernard Vonnegut found that silver iodide did the same. Irving P. Krick signed contracts with the West Texas Utilities Company and the city of Dallas and ran ground generators that released silver iodide into the updrafts. His results too were inconclusive. Commercial projects multiplied in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Texas Weather Modification Act of 1967 put cloud seeding under state license.
Hail and HIPLEX
Not every farmer wanted more rain. In 1970 growers in Hale County organized to seed storm clouds from aircraft and keep hail from forming, and Lamb County farmers followed in 1973. Planes guided by radar released silver iodide so that countless small ice particles would melt before reaching the ground. The project was disputed from the start, and in 1976 it stopped amid claims that it was cutting the rain as well as the hail. From 1973 the federal HIPLEX program studied shower clouds over the Texas High Plains for six years.
Of all the Texas rain projects the Handbook reviewed, only one ran long enough to be properly judged: the Colorado River Municipal Water District's program out of Big Spring, which several studies credited with more rain in its target area. Post's town keeps his story at the Garza County Historical Museum, and the wide sky the seeders work under can be watched from Big Spring State Park.