Page 175 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932. GE also announced that he would con-
tinue working in a consulting capacity, primarily with Project Cirrus. 65

a Pathological Passion

Even in retirement, Langmuir continued to make increasingly outrageous claims.
He was a featured speaker at the National Academy of Sciences annual meeting
held in Schenectady in october 1950. There, on the occasion of receiving the John
J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science, presented by NAS president D.
W. Bronk, he reiterated his claim that silver iodide seeding in New Mexico on July
21, 1949, had produced 0.1 inch of rain over an area of 33,000 square miles and
could have led to unusually heavy rains and flooding in Kansas a few days later, 700
to 900 miles downwind. Suits must have been in the audience, and he must have
been seething. 66
Distinguished meteorologist Charles Hosler tells of an encounter with
Langmuir at a symposium at MIT in 1951 where the seventy-two-year-old
scientist was again describing how cloud seeding had apparently changed the
course of a hurricane off the coast of Florida, causing it to veer westward and
hit Savannah, Georgia. When the twenty-seven-year-old Hosler, with a newly
minted doctorate in meteorology, pointed out that forecasters had attributed
the change in the hurricane’s direction to steering currents in the larger-scale
circulation, and that the small amount of ice generated by cloud seeding
would have been overwhelmed by naturally occurring ice in the storm, Lang-
muir, in essence, replied that Hosler “was so stupid that [he] didn’t deserve
67
an explanation and that [he] should figure it out.” During a meeting break,
Henry G. Houghton, the chair of the Department of Meteorology at MIT,
took Hosler aside and explained to him that Langmuir’s attitude stemmed
from his belief that cloud seeding was his greatest scientific discovery and he
had no time or patience to listen to objections—yet another characteristic of
pathological science.
Langmuir had made such claims early and often. He spoke about how Project
Cirrus had redirected Hurricane King at a meeting of the National Academy of
Sciences in November 1947, only a month after the event. He made similar claims
on national television on the Today Show when it broadcast from Schenectady,
68
the hometown of host Dave Garroway. Throughout his life, Langmuir made
claims for weather control that could not be substantiated by meteorologists.
Storms of controversy raged for years between Langmuir and the U.S. Weather

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