Word: vonnegutisms
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Still the scientists keep trying. Supported by the Navy and the National Science Foundation, Dr. Bernard Vonnegut of Arthur D. Little, Inc. has been trying for five years to hook up with significant amounts of atmospheric electricity. At first he tried flying tethered balloons into the base of thunderheads. Nothing much happened. A tiny spark jumped from the end of the mooring wire, but never a thunderbolt followed, not even when lightning was flashing all around. Apparently the wire drew ions out of the nearby parts of the cloud, thus insulating itself from full-scale lightning...
Last summer Dr. Vonnegut led an elaborate thunderstorm study near Socorro, N. Mex., where a stationary thundercloud forms almost every day above 10,300-ft Mount Withington. The scientists flew instrument-laden balloons into the handy cloud; they flew airplanes through it and over it. With a helicopter they strung thin wires between Mount Withington and neighboring peaks, and used them to inject electrical charges into clouds. Though they gathered valuable information about cloud electricity, none of their efforts made lightning strike when they wanted...
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...