Fire, rain and the amazing Vonnegut brothers

SALISBURY — Ginger Strand — author, journalist, and contributing editor at Orion magazine — really loves infrastructure, especially hydro-infrastructure. She was reading a history of New York City’s water supply system when she discovered the little-known incident that became the seed for her new book, “The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic.”

She explained it with a slideshow at The White Hart inn on Wednesday, Nov. 18, for The White Hart Speaker Series presented by Oblong Books and Scoville Memorial Library. 

In 1950, New York City, in a drought and low on drinking water, decided to cloudseed the Catskills. When a huge storm devastated the Catskills, New York City was sued. Headlines proclaimed, “Rainmaking abandoned.”

Strand learned that Kurt Vonnegut’s older brother, Bernard, was behind the invention of cloudseeding. She “was struck by the poetic image of this brother bringing down water and life from the sky, and this other brother trapped in a basement while fire and death were raining down on him.” 

Vonnegut was interned in Dresden during the devastating bombing attack on the city during World War II. That experience led to his novel “Slaughterhouse Five.”

“I was interested in that juxtaposition,” Strand explained. The more she looked into it, the more interesting the story became. On the same day in 1945 that Kurt, a POW, was in Dresden during  the bombing raid by the Allied forces, his brother was in a bomber flying over Minneapolis, conducting a study on airplane de-icing that would help keep American bombers in the sky.

Strand originally envisioned an essay about the Vonnegut brothers’ intertwining trajectories and the birth of weather modification, but a friend suggested it be her next book.

She uncovered a sibling rivalry. Kurt, the class clown with vague ambitions to write,  flunked out of Cornell. He was overshadowed by his genius brother with a PhD in chemistry who, while messing around with dry ice in General Electric’s research lab, figured out how to make clouds rain.

Bernard got Kurt a job at GE writing press releases. But Kurt found the inspiration for a new kind of story: scientists grappling with problems caused by their inventions. His formula, said Strand, was “to take things he saw at GE, and amp up their effects to amp up the ethical dilemma.”

Everyone wanted a piece of GE’s weather control. Combing through the GE archives, Strand found requests from ski resorts, filmmakers and the government of Chile wanting to fix the problem of its deserts.

The military even tried to steer a hurricane into Cuba. The hurricane, which had been going out to sea, did a dogleg and slammed into Georgia, creating a scandal.

“That was a turning point for Bernie,” Strand said. He worried about his well-intentioned discovery, especially as he read the stories his brother was writing. 

“They were more alike than they thought, committed to the same thing.” 

Strand said the Vonnegut family was extremely helpful and generous to her as she researched. “It became obvious to me that it’s hard to share your family with the world like that, and they did.” 

Bernard’s family was “especially happy,” she said, because Bernard, now well overshadowed by his brother, was at last getting some recognition too.