Word: clouds
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...From the cloud's upper surface great pustules of vapor arose. Out of its base poured streamers of snow. They evaporated before they could reach the ground, but Schaefer flew back to Schenectady in triumph. He had touched off the first man-made snowstorm...
Magic Pellets. Schaefer's cloud-poisoning act was the fruit of long, careful experiment. After much research, he learned how to turn the trick in miniature. First he cooled the air in a laboratory cold chamber (rather like a deep-freeze cabinet) to about 5° below zero, Fahrenheit. He breathed into the chamber and his breath condensed to fog. He made a magic pass with a single pellet of dry ice. The fog cleared, and glittering snowflakes drifted on to the chamber's floor. From this point it was easy to expand the process to full, outdoor...
Both the indoor fog and the outdoor cloud, explained Schaefer, were "supercooled"; their tiny droplets, though well below the freezing point, were liquid water, not ice. They wanted to freeze, but for some reason could not. The dry-ice pellets broke the deadlock. "An almost infinite number" of submicroscopic "ice seeds" formed near their surface. These grew into snowflakes at the expense of the water droplets. The supercooled cloud precipitated...
Planned Storms. The "latent heat" liberated by the freezing of the water produced turbulence in the cloud, spreading the reaction through its mass. Schaefer figured that a single pellet falling 2,000 feet through a cloud might produce several tons of snow. Snowmaking will not cure droughts over large areas. It cannot conjure moisture out of an atmosphere which contains too little to precipitate. But possibly farmers in irrigated districts may coax more snow to fall on the mountain areas which feed their ditches...
...auspicious one for the offering of sacrifices; the twelfth day favors the digging of graves, the making of coffins, and the burial of the dead. On the night of Nov. 11, 36 black-robed Taoist priests gathered in the compound of Peiping's ancient and beautiful Paiyunkuan (White Cloud temple). They had come to sit in judgment, and to propitiate the Taoist gods...