Word: langmuir
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...rainmaking got a bad setback more than a year ago when the Air Force and the Weather Bureau spewed quantities of dry ice into juicy Ohio clouds and produced hardly any rain (TIME, Dec. 6, 1948). But Nobel Prizewinner Irving Langmuir, leading backer of scientific rainmaking, is notably hard to discourage. Last week he told a Manhattan meeting of the American Meteorological Society and the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences about more successful experiments in New Mexico...
After learning something about non-vacuum (gas-filled) tubes, Dr. Langmuir decided to reverse his field. His experimenting resulted in a high-vacuum transmitting tube, the heart of modern radio broadcasting.* Further work with gas and heat brought about the atomic hydrogen welding arc, which welds and fuses dissimilar metals...
...Practical Side. Dr. Langmuir experimented in the field of surface chemistry (the arrangement and orientation of molecules at the surface of objects), but what he did appeared at first to be an exercise in pure science. Later, his monomolecular findings contributed to the development of "invisible" glass, and proved helpful in the analysis of certain protein-like compounds...
...Langmuir, now 68, will continue to be a G.E. consultant. He will go on working with Dr. Vincent J. Schaefer on Project Cirrus, the experiments in seeding clouds with chemicals to produce rain, and will dabble in whatever else interests him. Says the man who is still inquisitive: "Whatever work I've done, I've done...
...Neither Langmuir nor G.E. could get a patent on the high-vacuum tube; it was considered only one contribution to the development of high-power tubes...