Word: vonnegut
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Langmuir soon decided, has other limitations. It affects a cloud only while falling through it, and the ice motes it creates must take effect immediately or they will evaporate. Dr. Bernard Vonnegut, another of Langmuir's bright protégés, was assigned the job of finding some sort of permanent, nonvolatile particles that would hang in the air long enough for ice to form on them...
Water, reasoned Vonnegut, forms hexagonal ice crystals with well-known characteristics. If another hexagonal crystal could be found with nearly the same characteristics, the water molecules in the air might be fooled into building up on it as if it were a genuine ice nucleus...
...Vonnegut thumbed through fat books on crystallography. At last he spotted a promising compound: silver iodide. Its molecules do not resemble water molecules, but they build into crystals almost exactly like those...
...first trial was a failure; Vonnegut's commercial silver iodide was too impure. He tried again with a few specks of pure silver iodide, which he evaporated from an electrically heated wire. At once the captive cloud in his cold chamber turned into snow. The merest smidge of the magic iodide seemed to be enough...