Word: pelleting
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...tommy-like target rifle works on the principle of the slingshot. It shoots BB-sized ball-bearing pellets, carefully machined so that they will fly straight. The propellant is a thick rubber band inside the barrel. The gun is cocked by stretching the band taut with a metal piece containing the pellet, which slides inside the barrel. The trigger releases the slide which snaps out the pellet...
...rifle, which has a peep sight and range and windage adjustments, is so accurate that a reasonably good shot can hit a thumbnail-sized target at 30 feet. Yet the pellet travels slowly enough to be dangerous only to eyes...
...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...
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...
Each of the pea-sized pellets contains in a clay matrix a few husked germs of Lehmann's Lovegrass (a hardy, dry-weather forage crop), a dash of fertilizer and a pinch of insect-&-rodent repellent. Scattered from a "centrifugal planter" (a rimless wheel with spokes of finch pipe), they will seed a swath about 1,000 ft. wide, at the rate of one pellet per square foot. If moisture, sun and temperature conditions are right, the seeds should germinate in the double-quick time of 48 hours, and each will start life with a helpful inheritance of rich...