Word: langmuir
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...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...
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...
Chain Reaction. Last July 21, said Langmuir, the Albuquerque weather forecast predicted no substantial amounts of rain. But at 5:30 a.m. Project Cirrus' ground generator (a gadget for releasing silver iodide smoke) started a day-long run. About 8:30 a.m. a big cloud formed down wind from the generator. At 9:57, a chain reaction started inside it, filling the cloud with raindrops that showed on a radar screen. Lightning flashed, thunder rolled, and heavy rain fell over a large area. Later thunderstorms near by watered other parts of New Mexico...
Only 300 grams (about ⅔ Ib.) of silver iodide were used on that day, and Dr. Langmuir offered elaborate mathematical proof that this small amount brought down 320 billion gallons of rain, enough to fill all of New York City's reservoirs. He thinks that the iodide particles, drifting eastward, caused a long streak of rain through southern Colorado and Kansas. "It is very important," he concluded, "that regular tests on certain selected days of each week be carried out throughout the year using amounts of seeding agents just sufficient to obtain conclusive statistical data as to their effectiveness...
...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...