Page 160 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

by cooling supercooled clouds, and his success was likely only a coincidence.
Veraart’s lack of an academic affiliation and his excessive enthusiasm led Dr. E.
van Everdingen, head of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Service, to brand him a
“non-meteorologist and charlatan.” Meteorologist Horace Byers wrote in 1974
17
that Veraart’s vague concepts on changing the thermal structure of clouds, modi-
fying temperature inversions, and creating electrical effects were not accepted by
the scientific community. Thus, instead of Veraart, it is the scientists at GE who
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are remembered as the pioneers in weather control.
Schaefer was trained as a machinist and toolmaker at GE and joined Lang-
muir’s research team in 1932, specializing in building models, devices, and proto-
types. He was involved in outdoor activities, including nature study, preservation,
and hiking in the Adirondack Mountains. In 1940 he became widely known for
his method of replicating individual snowflakes using a thin plastic coating. on
July 12, 1946, Schaefer attempted to cool off a home freezer that he was using
as a cloud chamber by dropping a chunk of dry ice into it. To his surprise, he
saw the cold cloud instantly transform into millions of tiny ice crystals (figure
5.1). Later measurements indicated that he had reduced the temperature of the
o
o

chamber from –12 to –35 C (10 to –31 F) and had generated an ice cloud from
“supercooled” water droplets. His GE laboratory notebook for the day reads: “I
have just finished a set of experiments in the laboratory which I believe points
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out the mechanism for the production of myriads of ice crystals.” Schaefer
later recalled
It was a serendipitous event, and I was smart enough to figure out just what hap-
pened . . . so I took the big chunk out of the chamber and used the smaller one and a
still smaller one until I finally found that by producing the supercooled cloud, and
then scratching a piece of dry ice held above the chamber, a tiny grain would just
flood the chamber with ice crystals. So I knew I had something pretty important. 20

The following week, on July 17, when Langmuir returned from a trip and wit-
nessed the effect, he scribbled in his laboratory notebook “Control of Weather”
above his analysis of Schaefer’s discovery. Schaefer recalled that Langmuir “was
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just ecstatic and he was very excited and said, ‘Well, we’ve got to get into the
atmosphere and see if we can do things with natural clouds.’ So I immediately
began to plan . . . to seed a natural cloud.” 22
Speculation was rampant that summer about the possibilities of weather
control. on July 31, Schaefer made some rough calculations that indicated that
if a 50-pound block of dry ice, costing $2.50, could be ground up and dispersed

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