The original Weather Boy's

[EndtheMadnessNow]

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

From Project Cirrus 122 page history technical document: During the war Bernard Vonnegut worked for the Chemical Warfare Service. The members of Project Cirrus had worked on various issues of gas mask efficacy, chemical weapons, precipitation static  and aircraft icing:



GE Research Lab - History of Project Cirrus (July 1952; 122 page PDF)

Other related weather projects Bernard Vonnegut worked on from this LIST OF PUBLICATIONS

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.

Source: "WEATHER MODIFICATION and/or PROJECT CIRRUS and/ or PROJECT STORMFURY and/ or CLOUD SEEDING and/or OPERATION POPEYE and/or PROJECT CUMULUS." Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by Intellipedia (2017). Black Vault PDF


July 21, 1951: "Doctor Vincent J. Schaefer weather scientist at the General Electric research laboratory... said the fact that seeding operations in the west are more widespread this year than ever before made it imperative that a critical but unbiased study should be made..."



And in Mid-July 1951:


Great Flood of 1951


Dr. Langmuir blames Air Force for the disastrous Missouri Valley floods of June 1952...




GE ad in Boys' Life Nov 1950...





Vincent J. Schaefer Obit

Ha, beware of those gardeners! Though BIAD is still learning the art of 'Make it Stop!'.



Bernard Vonnegut, 82, Physicist Who Coaxed Rain From the Sky




Patent for Process for controlling weather Inventor: Harvey M. Brandau

Patent for Weather modification method Inventor: Robert G. Knollenberg

God device genres cadres Inventor: Svetozar B. Petrovich

Many more:
Devices or methods for influencing weather conditions

Conspiracy disclaimer: Yes, patent registers include dozens of methods for modifying weather conditions, albeit in a specific and localised way. Furthermore, just because there is a patent on a technique does not mean that it works or that it will be realised. Rather, it means that its owner believes it has commercial (or military) potential. That said we all know there has been plenty of Geo-engineering experiments.



Weather Modification in Southeast Asia