Headline June 24th, 2012 / ''!!Arm The Cloud!!''

''!!Arm The Cloud!!'' : 'Boom, Boom, Boom.' 

Author Kurt Vonnegut, who had joined brother Bernard as the PR face of the project, had some years
earlier conceived the idea of an imaginary crystal that would set off a chain reaction, solidifying rivers and oceans at warm temps!!?

He took this up with the British science writer H.G.Wells, who was uninterested. So, on Nov 13, 1946, a monoplane with GE pilot at the control, the former gardner V Schaefer dribbled pellets of dry ice into a bank of super cooled cloud at 14,000 feet. 

Soon veils of snow began falling from the base of seeded clouds. New York Times published the story two days later. Further operations followed, soon with the use of Bernard Vonnegut's silver iodide, an agent so efficient that a few pounds of it in theory suffice to seed the entire north American sky. 

Even in practice, with heavier loads, the fallout would be so light that the pollution from such efforts would be essentially unmeasurable. On the morning of Dec 20, 1946, Schenectady lay under a dense overcast, with a forecast for snow in the evening. Schaefer began to seed. 

By the time he returned, a heavy snow was falling at the rate of an inch an hour across more than a hundred miles. The researchers suspected that they had perhaps initiated a chain reaction that had spread the process of crystallization far beyond the swaths that they had seeded. 

Suddenly recognizing the potential legal liability, GE in 1947, transferred the program to the U.S. government. The three pioneers went with it. Lanngmuir believed he had made by far the most important decision of his career. In his enthusiasm for cloud seeding's potential he began to speculate openly about banishng drought, flood, and hail, controlling snowstorms, and transforming the Aanerican southwest into a garden of plenty. 

Because of his reputation as one of America's greatest scientists, his enthusiasm was taken as a promise. Pinched souls have since accused him of seeking publicity, of loosing his analytical objectivity. Be that it may, until the day he died, 10 years later, Langmuir believed he had witnessed a major turning point in the history of the world. 

He was not alone. Such was the urge to engineer the weather that in no time an entire industry was born. With the U.S, government funding the basic research in the background, practitioners jumped ahead to offer operational cloud seeding to eager customers. Cloud seeding then spread to Australia, South Africa, Europe, Russia, and then it arrived in China. Bur the Chinese took the low-budget approach of firing at the sky with rockets and anti-aircraft guns. 

So join up again tomorrow as we unveil delightful premises. 

Good Night And God Bless!

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