People said John von Neumann was a demigod. He had made a good study of Homo sapiens, declared his colleagues in Princeton and Washington and Los Alamos, so good he could impersonate our species with nearly perfect panache. Every so often, though, when he cut quickly to the heart of a mathematical quandary or began reciting from memory a book he’d read decades earlier—in ancient Greek—or when one totted up the sheer number of appointments and directorships and consultancies the man held, then the facade would slip. The dapper suits, the glittering parties, and the urbane aplomb that won him the nickname Gentleman Johnnie—sometimes all of it just couldn’t disguise the obvious: this creature could not be human.
Harry Wexler liked him a lot.
They were alike, Harry and Johnnie. Both were Jewish mathematicians, Wexler the son of prosperous Russian immigrants, von Neumann from Hungary’s Jewish upper class. Harry had taught at the University of Chicago and Aviation Cadet School during the war; von Neumann had taught in Berlin before joining the exodus of professors fleeing Germany in the 1930s. Harry found his home at the U.S. Weather Bureau in 1934, one year after Johnnie found his at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Known as a “paradise for scholars,” the Institute for Advanced Study was founded in 1930. It’s not a part of Princeton University but a private research institution located in the same town. Von Neumann became one of the initial five members, along with Albert Einstein and the mathematicians Oswald Veblen, Hermann Weyl, and James Alexander. Johnnie was the youngest of these luminaries, but he had already made vital contributions in the mathematical fields of game theory, measure theory, fluid dynamics, quantum mechanics, and ergodic theory—the study of long-term average behavior in dynamic systems like traffic jams and weather. Like Harry, he had a reputation for asking searching questions and efficiently getting to the heart of a matter.
Both Harry and Johnnie felt comfortable working with the military. Von Neumann had done the math confirming the implosion method used in the Trinity test and in the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki, but in contrast to many scientists he had no moral qualms about his work on the bomb. He had been present for the Trinity explosion and the nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll. Like his friend Edward Teller, he believed the United States should get on with building the “Super”—a thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bomb. In fact, he was an advocate of preventive nuclear strikes: it was what game theory said a rational actor should do. But now, he told people, he was thinking about something much more important than bombs. He was thinking about computers.
In 1946, “computer” was generally understood to mean a human being—usually a woman—who sat with a slide rule or an adding machine and did equations. But although Johnnie was known to have an eye for pretty women, in this case he was thinking about something else: high-speed calculating machines—the mechanical computers that would soon replace the human ones. Von Neumann had served as a consultant on the design of the world’s first electronic general-purpose computer, ENIAC, but even before the Army received it in 1946, he was consulting on the design of an improved computer, EDVAC. Now he was refining the architecture for an even better one he planned to build at the Institute for Advanced Study. And that’s where Harry Wexler came in.
Von Neumann needed a problem he could give his new device publicly to demonstrate its chops. The military-funded machine would mainly be used to run calculations for the hydrogen bomb, but those calculations would be secret. Johnnie needed something he could talk up for reporters, and weather modeling would be perfect. He was an expert in hydrodynamics and was friends with the eminent meteorologist Carl-Gustaf Rossby. Past attempts to model the weather with numerical methods had failed for lack of computing power. John von Neumann’s new machine would solve that problem.
Von Neumann brought in a friend from RCA Labs, the engineer Vladimir Zworykin. Zworykin was a radio pioneer whose work would lay the foundation for television, but he also had an interest in weather. In October 1945, Zworykin issued “Outline of Weather Proposal,” a report for which von Neumann wrote an enthusiastic letter of support. The outline declared that advances in computing technology would now “permit the prediction of [air] mass movements for perhaps several days in advance with results obtained within a few minutes.” Once the weather prediction problem was solved, he wrote, attention could be turned to weather control.
Zworykin and von Neumann went to the Weather Bureau in January 1946, where they painted a dramatic picture of the climate tamed: rain made by seeding clouds with dust or chemicals, storms redirected with flamethrowers or atomic bombs, water temperatures raised by spreading oil over water, and air temperatures increased by painting the earth with carbon or aluminum to increase absorption or reflectivity. The ultimate goal, as the outline put it, was to “channel the world’s weather, as far as possible, in such a way as to minimize the damage from catastrophic disturbances, and otherwise to benefit the world to the greatest extent by improved climactic conditions where possible.”
The first step was to develop a whole new approach to weather prediction. In the past, meteorologists had made forecasts by comparing present weather maps with past ones, assuming the atmosphere would behave much as it had before. Numerical weather prediction would be different. Von Neumann planned to divide the atmosphere up into a grid and collect as many data about each point in the grid as possible. He would then apply mathematical equations from thermodynamics to predict the likely future behavior of each point given the behavior of the points near it. It was a wholehearted embrace of the clockwork universe: turn the weather into an equation and solve for X.
The Institute for Advanced Study’s Meteorology Project, funded by the Office of Naval Research in May 1946, was designed to take the “first steps towards influencing the weather by rational, human intervention.” By the time GE announced the manufacture of snow over Mount Greylock, Johnnie was assembling a meteorology team in Princeton to restate meteorological problems as equations in fluid dynamics, then feed them into his artificial brain. At the same time, he was gathering a team to build that brain. It was a method about as far from the GE scientists’ approach as could be imagined. Instead of staring at the sky, the institute team would be staring at their calculations. Instead of conducting experiments in the natural atmosphere, they would program a machine to do math. But the goal was the same: figure out how the weather worked so that they could bend it to their will.
The Weather Bureau’s man on the project was Harry Wexler.
* * *
Bernie lowered his popgun into Vince’s freezer and squeezed the trigger. He had bought the gun for seventy-five cents in the toy department of H. S. Harney, downtown. It went off with a pop that sounded like a firecracker or a fart.
Beans, beans, the magical fruit:
The more you eat the more you toot …
Bernie loved that rhyme. He wasn’t as big a fan of slapstick as Kurt and Alice, but like them he had an earthy sense of humor. Farting was funny. Poop was funny. Playing jokes was funny too, and the popgun was a kind of joke on nature. When he popped it, the cloud chamber filled with ice nuclei. It was just the kind of experiment he liked: a trick played on the natural world to make it yield up its secrets. It worked because the air in the popgun was under pressure. Compressing gases increases their temperature; decompressing them cools them. When released, the air in the popgun expanded rapidly, cooling the air around it, and the cold nucleated the ice. The same thing happened, Bernie found, when he opened a bottle of soda pop in the cooler or popped a bubble in a sheet of bubble wrap. He did it over and over, grinning every time, until Katharine Blodgett, a few feet away at her desk, thought she might go mad. But the lab’s constant stream of visitors loved it.
At the meeting of the American Physical Society at Columbia University that January, Bernie, Irving, and Vince delivered a joint paper and demonstrated seeding with the freezer, using dry ice pellets, the popgun, a bursting balloon, and a hot wire carrying silver iodide. The New York Times ran a story about their paper the next day, pointing out that “work has not progressed far enough to permit predicting actual uses.” GE was now insisting that they be much more circumspect in explaining what they were up to.
Since the first media frenzy, Research Lab director Guy Suits had been worrying about legal entanglements. Now every time something strange happened with the weather, GE was suspected of interfering. So many clippings credited Vincent Schaefer with strange weather phenomena that when the director of the Berkshire Museum was injured slipping on a patch of ice, someone sent Vince the clipping, noting that for once he wasn’t blamed.
But Suits had a plan for limiting liabilities. In February, he sent Bernie, Vince, and Irving copies of their new contract with the government. GE would no longer be engaging in airborne experiments to modify the weather. Instead, flight experiments would be “conducted by the government, using exclusively government personnel and equipment, and shall be under the exclusive direction and control of such Government personnel.” The lead agencies would be the U.S. Army Signal Corps and the Office of Naval Research. GE employees working on the project were merely advisers and were to “refrain from asserting any control or direction over the flight program. The GE Research Laboratory responsibility is confined strictly to laboratory work and reports.”
Their project was being handed off to the military. But no one was terribly upset. The experiment was the heart of the matter, and for it to go forward, the lawyers needed to be appeased. The idea that cloud seeding would be used as a weapon didn’t seem real, the military men around them just an irritating condition of work. Besides, there were advantages. The Signal Corps had smart scientists and even better airplanes than GE. And they were all given raises when the government contract went into effect. For Bernie, it was his second raise that month. They discussed a code name for the program. Vincent suggested “Project Cirrus.”
They all applied for security clearance. President Truman had just announced a new loyalty program for federal workers mandating FBI investigations of all government employees and making it possible to dismiss any federal worker who could be shown to have “sympathetic associations” with organizations deemed communist, fascist, or subversive. Just to be safe, Irving resigned his sponsorship of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship. Membership in such organizations could get one investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, as was happening now to the physicist Edward Condon, whom Truman had nominated to head the National Bureau of Standards. The former Manhattan Project physicist was a follower of the suspiciously “revolutionary” theory of quantum mechanics, and had come out strongly in favor of civilian control of atomic energy. Now he was undergoing a direct personal attack by Representative J. Parnell Thomas, the chairman of HUAC.
That wasn’t going to happen to Irving. His resignation letter struck all the right notes, disavowing his previous positive attitude toward Russia, equating “appeasement” with “national suicide,” and noting that unless the United States got tough, the Russians would build atomic bombs. He did not mention that he himself had told Congress that Russia would inevitably have atomic bombs within five years. For all his absentmindedness, Irving was no political novice.
Bernie didn’t have to worry about such things. He had his political views, but he kept them to himself. He was more of a behind-the-scenes innovator, not someone who put himself forward, who got asked to put his name on the letterhead of organizations like the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship.
GE and the Army Signal Corps jointly issued a press release announcing the creation of Project Cirrus. In keeping with their new publicity aims, the announcement focused on more modest effects than the ones Irving liked to tout: it mentioned dispelling fogs and clouds over airports, noting that only after much more research might the work lead to “manipulation of gigantic natural forces for the benefit of mankind everywhere.” GE made sure to note that its scientists would “provide advice and instruction, but [would] not take part in the flight program.”
And then things returned to what passed for normal at the House of Magic: Vincent continued making flights, Langmuir continued working out equations, and Bernie built a generator on the roof of Building 5 to dispense silver iodide into the Schenectady sky.
* * *
As the baby’s arrival approached, Kurt amped up his efforts to find a “real” job. He and Jane might fantasize about writing for a living, but with a baby he needed a paycheck and security. He’d applied for a job writing catalog copy for Sears & Roebuck—getting as far as being given a tour of its Chicago offices—but no luck. In the solicitation letter he sent to a range of possible employers, he described himself as about to receive a master’s degree from Chicago, “twenty-four, married, and the father of a very young child.” He mentioned his service in the war and noted that his anthropology work had been “extremely satisfactory from a personal standpoint.” His grasp of human relations, he said, should make him valuable as a “personnel or labor relations man.”
He got back some positive replies. He’d been offered a couple of copywriting jobs at ad agencies. He could continue on as a reporter. He had an offer of a teaching post in a private school and another for an editorial spot at an educational publisher. All he had to do was finish up the degree. So, as Jane’s due date approached, he hammered out a thesis plan. Called “A Comparison of Elements of Ghost Dance Mythology with That Mythology of a More Tranquil Period,” it proposed comparing late-nineteenth-century Native American uprisings with the work of Cubist painters in Paris in the early twentieth century. To his mind, it was bold and original, the kind of work other people in the department did: drawing connections among cultures without suggesting one was better than another, striving to find the elements that made human beings in one time and place much like those in another.
On May 11, their son was born. Mark, named after Mark Twain, came squalling into the world right around the time the University of Chicago anthropology department rejected his father’s thesis proposal.
* * *
Once again, Bernie had to get out his popgun. The demonstration always amused him, but lately it sometimes felt as if they spent more time glad-handing visiting dignitaries than doing science. On this bright August day, a team of high-ranking Army and Navy men had come to Schenectady for the official launch of Project Cirrus. They got the tour and the cold-box demonstrations that were beginning to become a little like a dog-and-pony show. But the military brass loved it. Weather was almost like a new toy for them. As Rear Admiral Luis de Florez had written in The American Magazine the previous September: “We must consider the possibility that man-controlled weather can become a terrifying weapon. We must reckon with rivers and lakes as potentially terrible enemies. Sea disturbances—call them man-made tidal waves—may well be a factor in the next war … America must expand the scope of her thinking if she is to retain her position among nations in the world of tomorrow.” The article was titled “Weather—the New Super Weapon.”
That wasn’t the kind of application Bernie hoped to see their work producing. He would rather see it used to save lives. That’s what he’d tried to do earlier that month, when a telephone call came into the lab asking Project Cirrus to help put out a forest fire in California.
The fire had started in early August, in the tinder-dry brush north of Pasadena. Within a day, warm southwest winds had swept the flames through Big Tujunga Canyon, where they consumed more than three thousand acres. On August 6, a forest service employee and a volunteer were killed as they frantically worked to make a firebreak. Residents were evacuated, highways were closed, and the Navy dispatched 280 seamen to help. Still the supervisor of the Angeles National Forest went on the radio pleading for more volunteers. As many as 800 people were fighting what was called the worst wildfire in a quarter century when someone thought to call GE.
Frank Backus of the Los Angeles GE office was on the line when Bernie got to the phone. The Los Angeles Times had lined up a DC-3 and four hundred pounds of dry ice. What should they do now?
Bernie had tried to explain how to seed a cloud. But even as he talked, he knew it was futile. The problem was the clouds were low in the sky. The plane was above them at fourteen thousand feet, meaning that in California’s climate they were probably too warm to contain supercooled water. Still, the flight crew wanted to try. They made five passes over the cloud deck, dispensing 60 to 120 pounds of dry ice each time, as per Bernie’s instructions. Unfortunately, the cloud, reported the Los Angeles Times, “failed to cooperate.”
The effort was unsuccessful, but it had illuminated the high stakes of getting this right. Once Bernie got silver iodide to work in the natural atmosphere, it would be easier than ever to bring water and life, instead of fire and death, down from the clouds. At least that’s what Bernie was hoping for. The Signal Corps colonel and the Army brigadier general visiting the lab might have had something else in mind. Perhaps they were thinking of what General George Kenney, of the Strategic Air Command, had recently told the graduates and alumni of MIT: “The nation that first learns to plot the paths of air masses … will dominate the globe.”
Bernie lowered his popgun into the freezer and seeded the miniature cloud. This time, it was for the News Bureau photographer too. The PR men never missed an opportunity to show GE in the nation’s service, and the colonel and the general looked impressive, their lapels paved with rows of colorful ribbons. In the photograph sent to newspapers, Bernie would be smirking as he popped the toy gun. The officers would be smiling slightly too as they leaned forward to look into the freezer. The bursting flashbulbs would catch something slightly acquisitive in the military men’s expressions, perhaps an eagerness for a time when the freezer would be replaced by the sky and the gun they aimed would be real.
* * *
“To Walt and Helen.” Kurt and Jane clinked martinis. Walter had graduated, and he and his family had moved to the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington. They were going to be homesteaders, building their own cabin, growing their own food, probably raising sheep and knitting sweaters from their wool. It was an admirable escape from everything—money pressure, school pressure, job pressure. Kurt and Jane missed them, and they envied them a little too.
Next they raised their glasses to the UN Atomic Energy Commission, which had been spending August hammering out plans for international control of atomic energy at the UN’s temporary home in Lake Success, New York. Two days earlier, the United States, Great Britain, China, and France had given the plan their support. Kurt and Jane let themselves enjoy a moment of optimism about a peaceful future, free from fear of the bomb. It was August 31, the eve of their anniversary, and they were celebrating at the restaurant Jacques. It was an overpriced French joint, with a mural of the Eiffel Tower and waiters sporting fake French accents, but they needed a treat. They sat outdoors on the famous flagstone terrace and contemplated possible futures.
Mark was now almost four months old. But the joy of a new baby was somewhat undercut by the financial anxiety that arrived as predictably as night feedings and dirty diapers. Kurt’s job as a copy boy at the City News Bureau paid next to nothing. And because the anthropology professors hadn’t gone for his comparison of Native American uprisings and Cubist painters, he’d had to spend the summer cooking up a whole new thesis project—with money from the GI Bill running out.
The department’s unanimous rejection of his thesis proposal had been galling. It was as if they were suggesting he was no better at this than he had been at science. As if they considered him third-rate.
He’d gone back to his writing. While working on a new thesis outline, he had fired off stories and essays to magazines. Finally, he’d finished the new proposal and in late summer had submitted it to the department. In response to their earlier comments, it was much more modest. His new project took as its starting point the philosopher Georges Sorel’s claim that periods of social change cause the rise of new mythologies. Looking at Native American religious and spiritual movements in the late nineteenth century, he was going to analyze what effect the rapid assimilation caused by white colonist expansion had on the Indian myths. It was less ambitious, less creative, less out there than his previous effort.
The department didn’t hate it. Some of the professors even said encouraging things. With some more effort, the message was, he would get this right. But in August, he was offered the opportunity to become a reporter—full-time—at the City News Bureau. He took it. He’d had enough of the eggheads humiliating him. Pounding the streets looking for good copy—anything involving a dead body was best—that was something he felt confident he could do. He could be a reporter and keep working on his own essays and stories. Somehow he would also find time to work on his thesis.
But August brought a relentless flood of rejections. “Wailing Shall Be in All Streets” had been rejected six times. “Brighten Up!” was rejected by Glamour on August 11. He sent it off to Charles Angoff at The American Mercury, reminding him of his encouraging note a year earlier. Angoff returned it a week later, just a couple of days after “I Shall Not Want” was rejected by Coronet.
His writing was getting nowhere. And the City News Bureau job was grueling, all wrong for a family man. He was exhausted, and he and Jane hadn’t had a Sunday together in weeks. It was time to start considering other options. So over martinis and pricey French food, they talked through the possibilities.
A job offer from The Dayton Daily News was tempting, because Kurt loved being in a newsroom. But there was also an offer from the educational publisher Bobbs-Merrill in Indianapolis. There was a lot of appeal in the idea of going back to Indy. Their kids could grow up near their grandparents and with the kids of their old friends. But the couple would have to face the stifling social life of a city where family connections had carved out roles for them already. Besides, a new option had recently come into the picture: Schenectady and GE.
Earlier that week, Kurt had gotten a phone call from George Griffin at the GE News Bureau. He was responding to a letter Kurt had sent at Bernie’s suggestion. Bernie had already told George his younger brother might be a great hire for the News Bureau: he had a science background and real newspaper experience. The GE News Bureau was a publicity department, but it aimed to be as much like a real newspaper as possible—minus the objectivity, of course. In exchange for giving up journalistic credibility, one got the security and perks of a corporate position.
The GE job paid better than the others. It was in Schenectady, not too far from New York City, the center of the publishing world. And it was also near Bernard. As much as Kurt chafed under his brother’s influence, he also longed to be surrounded by family. Their kids could play together. Their wives would have each other for support. It was a new town and a new start, but with Bernard there it wouldn’t be lonesome. For the first time, they wouldn’t have to worry about money. They could buy a house. And without having to work nights and weekends, maybe Kurt could get some real writing done.
Jane agreed it was a good opportunity. The GE recruiter dropped by their house the very next night, as they were still basking in the mellow martini haze of their anniversary dinner. It was a great job with a real future, he assured Kurt. Of course, GE only hired college graduates. Kurt assured the recruiter that wouldn’t be a problem. He would soon be in possession of a master’s degree from Chicago. He was still planning to take his exams and write his thesis. He’d just have to do it while working.
To take the job at GE would be once more following his brother’s plan for his own life. But Bernie was only acting in Kurt’s best interests. Why resist?
He told the GE man yes.