Word: silver
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...begins a chain-smoking day with one of his eight-inch cigars-the first of 20-and a phone call on his private wire to the studio to find out how movies-his own and competitors'-are grossing around the country. After a shave by Sam ("The Barber") Silver, who comes out from the studio, Zanuck drives his green Cadillac ten miles to the lot, attacks production schedules, mail, memos and telegrams until 1 p.m. Then he takes a sawed-off polo mallet, which he uses as a sort of swagger stick, trots over to the executive dining room...
...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...
Last summer near Albuquerque, New Mexico some General Electric technicians set out to do something about the weather. On July 21 they vaporized ten ounces of silver iodide in a gas torch on the ground. 320 billion gallons of water, enough to fill all the reservoirs in New York, fell on the desert that afternoon. A lot of people would like to believe there was some connection...
...called forth new theories of rain-formation. The old explanation, which the Weather Bureau still favors, worked in terms of complex systems of wind. Rainmakers claim that precipitation depends more on nature's providing enough particles on which, raindrops can form-or on man's providing artificial particles, like silver iodide nuclei. To explain how this "seeding" can result in a violent storm, they provide a detailed "chain-reaction" theory...