Word: schaefer
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...chilly morning last week, Vincent J. Schaefer of General Electric climbed into a light plane at Schenectady's airport. While his boss, Nobel Prizewinner Irving Langmuir, watched from a control tower, Schaefer told the pilot to fly to a cloud 50 miles away...
...plane plunged into the cloud, Schaefer radioed back to Dr. Langmuir that he was about to begin. Then he carefully scattered six pounds of dry-ice pellets through the cloud in a belt three miles long. In two minutes flat the poisoned cloud was writhing with agonies so enormous that Dr. Langmuir could see them in faraway Schenectady...
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...
Albert A. Schaefer...