Page 165 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

5.2 Avalanche of news articles received by General Electric after press releases of
November 13 and 14, 1946. (schaefer papers)

A Los Angeles air pollution officer wrote to Schaefer, asking him for advice on
how to clear the air over the city. The chairman of the Kansas State Chamber of
Commerce sent a telegram to President Harry Truman, asking for relief of the
drought conditions using GE technology. This stimulated a reply from Francis W.
Reichelderfer, chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau, to the effect that dry ice seeding
worked only in special circumstances, and even then the results were controver-
sial, since no one had established a method to determine how much was caused by
human intervention and how much by natural processes. A cane sugar producer in
Hawaii wrote that he, too, had tried, in 1941, to make it rain, cooling the clouds by
launching slabs of dry ice into the valley fog from a huge slingshot on the moun-
tain summit. Since he was working with warm clouds, he would have needed an
enormous amount of dry ice. A newspaper editorial wondered if GE would be
forming a “snow cartel” to sell us a white Christmas. 33

threat of litigation

An extremely optimistic announcement of progress in weather modification
appeared in the General Electric Annual Report for 1947: “Further experiments

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