The Rain Makers

The dream of rain making is as old as man. For centuries, Chinese suppliants, barechested, short-trousered, and wearing bands of green grass about their heads, have paraded with their dragons and beaten gongs to bring rain. In the U.S., Indians still propitiate the Thunderbird with symbolic dances.

With the help of science, the dream has at last become reality. Across the land, flyers were making rain by simply dropping 100-lb. loads of pulverized dry ice (solidified carbon dioxide) into cumulus clouds, thus precipitating ice crystals which turn into rain. This week, sweltering Chicago got an 8-to-18 degree break in a heat wave just when a plane hired by the Herald-American brought man-made rain. The Herald-American, of course, claimed the credit. For days previously, others had been doing it:

P:In Richmond, Flying Instructor Brock Minor scattered 50 lbs. of dry ice into a cumulus cloud at 8,400 feet, brought the city its first shower in two weeks.

P: A Chicago Tribune airplane brought a 40-minute rain to suburban St. Charles, Ill., by "seeding" a 20,000-ft. cumulus cloud with 150 lbs. of dry ice.

P:In Coleman, Tex., long drought had dried up the town's only lake. Coleman was on the point of importing water by tank car when two local flyers dropped 100 lbs. of dry ice from 18,000 feet, brought a reported 2 1/2-in. rainfall. Next day they tried again, this time produced a 1-in. fall.

P:In Fort Worth, the Ed Ritchey Flying Service, supplied by the Parker-Browne Co., a big dry-ice producer, took up rain making as a business, brought one shower in its first two tries.

P:In Kansas City, big, hard-driving Kenneth Spencer, whose Spencer Chemical Co. has leased the Government's $20 million Jayhawk Ordnance Works (TIME, June 17, 1946), turned to rain making as a possible stimulant for his dry-ice sales. Spencer hired a crop-service plane, succeeded in bringing showers to Mission, Kans., Excelsior Springs, Mo. This week five farmers from Burlington, Iowa hired the same plane to make rain over their arid 1,500 acres; it made rain all right--over a golf course, leaving their farms still dry.

The new rainmaking method was developed only last year at General Electric Co.'s Schenectady, N.Y. laboratories by Engineer Vincent J. Schaefer and Nobel Prizewinner Dr. Irving Langmuir (TIME, Nov. 25).

Since it costs only $3 to $5 for the dry ice, plus the expense of the plane, the commercial possibilities are being explored by increasing numbers of flyers, chemical manufacturers. No one is more interested than the rain-starved farmers of the Corn Belt.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.