Word: langmuir
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...much of the Southwest, power companies, water districts, even farmers and cattlemen are hiring rainmakers to seed the reluctant clouds. Langmuir presented evidence that such overenthusiastic use of silver iodide has already prevented rain in certain areas...
...Irving Langmuir, high priest of scientific rainmaking, sounded a solemn warning last week: those who sow too many rainstorms may reap nothing but droughts. Speaking at the School of Mines in drought-threatened New Mexico, Langmuir denounced the commercial rainmakers, many of them woefully ignorant of the art, who are seeding the atmosphere with silver iodide throughout the dry Southwest. "Some of them," he said, "are using hundreds of thousands of times too much. No more than one milligram [.000035 oz] of silver iodide should be used for every cubic mile...
According to Langmuir's theory, silver iodide particles in the right amount will turn a cloud of supercooled (below freezing) water droplets into snowflakes. The flakes sink to warm lower levels, melt and fall as rain. But if there are too many iodide particles competing for the moisture in the water droplets, the snowflakes formed are too small to fall. They may even rise, drifting off as thin cirrus clouds that never yield any rain...
Rainmaker at Work. The great cloud-milking experiment was born last month when Mayor William O'Dwyer remembered how Nobel Prizewinning Scientist Irving Langmuir had caused 320 billion gallons of rain (enough to fill New York's reservoirs with 60 billion gallons to spare) to fall on arid New Mexico by burning $20 worth of silver iodide. Scientist Langmuir, just retired from General Electric Research Laboratory at 68, did not feel up to taking on New York's job himself, but on his recommendation the city hired as its chief rainmaker a 35-year-old, Harvard-trained...
...Weather Bureau, which has tried silver iodide on its own, is still skeptical. But Bureau Chief Dr. F. W. Reichelderfer agreed with Langmuir that careful tests should be made and the results scrutinized by disinterested scientists...