Quote:Kurt Vonnegut’s science-fiction novel “Cat’s Cradle” revolves around a tricky compound called ice-nine that can turn water solid at room temperature.

Vonnegut, who worked for GE in the 1950s as an in-house journalist, came up with many beautifully outlandish plots for his best-selling books. But ice research was hitting close to his beat as well as his home.

That’s because at the time, another member of his family was employed by GE — his brother, the physicist Bernard Vonnegut. Bernard, together with Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir and atmospheric scientist Vincent Schaefer, formed a crack research team looking for ways to control the weather and even break up hurricanes. In 1946, Schaefer made history when he flew into a cloud in a small plane and set off the world’s first artificial snowfall with a bag of dry ice. He was known as the Snow Man ever since.

Quote:Storms Above the Desert

Before July 1946, the famous observation that "everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it" might as well have been a law of physics. Weather modification belonged in the realm of hokum until that July. Then, without warning or expectation, chance favored the prepared mind of a General Electric Laboratories scientist named Vincent Schaefer, and cloud seeding was born.

Although Schaefer's discovery was sudden and serendipitous, much of the research behind it had been going on at GE since 1940. In that year, Schaefer's boss, Dr. Irving Langmuir, was approached by the U. S. Chemical Warfare Service to study the filtration processes used in gas masks. That entailed generating various kinds of smoke and studying their properties on the particle level. Langmuir, a Nobel laureate and, by all accounts, one of GE's resident geniuses, had in Schaefer a hard-working associate who contributed greatly to the research. (Schaefer started his GE career as a machinist; after working with Dr. Langmuir, he came to be a respected scientist in his own right.)

Langmuir and Schaefer continued with this and other aerosol-related war research until 1943, when they began investigating the properties of supercooled clouds as part of a study of precipitation static. This led them into the problem of aircraft icing, which was especially timely; large numbers of aircraft were flying in icing conditions on missions that could not be delayed or aborted because of bad weather. They studied the problem on Mount Washington, New Hampshire, which experiences some of the worst winter weather in the world.

Langmuir Lab, New Mexico

Quote:Schaefer's altered a cloud's heat budget, Vonnegut's altered formative crystal structure – an ingenious property related to a good match in lattice constant between the two types of crystal. (The crystallography of ice later played a role in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle.) The first attempt to modify natural clouds in the field through “cloud seeding” began during a flight that began in upstate New York on 13 November 1946. Schaefer was able to cause snow to fall near Mount Greylock in western Massachusetts, after he dumped six pounds of dry ice into the target cloud from a plane after a 60-mile easterly chase from the Schenectady County Airport.