Williamson Fiona
School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University, Singapore.
Hist Sci. 2023 Mar 31:732753221105026. doi: 10.1177/00732753221105026.
The late nineteenth to early twentieth century saw a small but dedicated rise in experimental rainmaking. The possibility that humanity might one day be able to control the weather - especially to alleviate drought - was very attractive to governments and private investors. The late nineteenth century was an era of scientific optimism and a number of rainmaking experiments across the world had brought the potential for weather control out of the realms of discourse and literature and further into tangible near-future science. There has been a small but thorough historiographical literature on this subject, focusing largely on American, British, and Australian efforts. This article seeks to build on this by exploring the little-known history of rainmaking in Hong Kong before 1930, centering on a case study of a particular experiment intended to alleviate the disastrous drought of 1928-9. As was the case elsewhere, Hong Kong's rainmaking efforts raised as much skepticism as they did support, with the government, scientists, and the general public in two minds about whether making rain was even possible. As such, this article aims to interrogate the concepts of the sociotechnical imaginary and the history of failure, while also contributing to the wider story of meteorological knowledge-making.
19世纪末至20世纪初见证了人工降雨实验虽小却专注的发展。人类有朝一日或许能够控制天气——尤其是缓解干旱——这一可能性对政府和私人投资者极具吸引力。19世纪末是一个科学乐观的时代，世界各地的一些人工降雨实验已使天气控制的潜力走出了讨论和文学领域，进一步成为切实可行的近期科学。关于这个主题有少量但深入的史学文献，主要聚焦于美国、英国和澳大利亚的努力。本文旨在在此基础上进行拓展，通过探究1930年前香港鲜为人知的人工降雨历史，以一项旨在缓解1928 - 1929年灾难性干旱的特定实验的案例研究为核心。与其他地方一样，香港的人工降雨努力引发的怀疑与支持不相上下，政府、科学家和普通民众对人工降雨是否可行都犹豫不决。因此，本文旨在审视社会技术想象和失败史的概念，同时也为气象知识形成的更广泛故事做出贡献。
