21. An Extreme Experiment: Blowing Up the Skies Over Texas
Reputable scientists and scholars scoffed at Edward Powers and his “Concussion Theory”. Two decades later, however, Senator Charles B. Farwell of Illinois read Powers’ book, and decided to test his pseudo-science. So he got Congress to appropriate $10,000 – a sizable amount at the time – to make the tests. With no legit scholars or scientists willing to risk their reputations by associating with something so wacky, a patent lawyer named Robert G. Dyrenforth was assigned the task of carrying out the experiment.
In August 1891, Dyrenforth set up shop in the Texas prairie and put on an impressive pyrotechnic display. His men blasted clouds with mortars and with dynamite carried aloft by kites, trailed by balloons filled with flammable hydrogen. To add to the noise and take it up to the extreme, Dyrenforth’s men increased the decibel levels by packing prairie dog holes full of dynamite and blowing them up as well. Unsurprisingly, the plan did not work. That did not stop Dyrenforth from falsely claiming that it did. His fabrications were exposed when a meteorologist, who had observed the experiment, published a scathing report about it in Nature.
