Bing Crosby was famously dreaming of a white Christmas, and so were many Americans this snowless holiday season [December 2011]. But a review of historical documents, archival photographs, and press clippings shows that GE scientists led by Nobel Prize winner Irving Langmuir mastered the technology of coaxing snow out of clouds half a century ago. Langmuir’s feat was even recorded in a 1950 Time magazine cover story titled “Can Man Learn to Control the Atmosphere He Lives In?”
Named Project Cirrus, Langmuir’s weather research was an outgrowth of a wartime study to prevent aircraft icing and improve radio communication inside winter storms. Langmuir, a polymath scientist who won his Nobel for work in chemistry that led to GE’s early coronary artery imaging technology, teamed up with his protégés Vincent Schaefer and Bernard Vonnegut to figure out the science of snow. “Why was it that sometimes snow forms so easily, with no apparent lack of nuclei on which crystals can grow, and at other times there seemed to be none?” asked the G-E Review magazine in November 1952.
(Bernard Vonnegut’s brother, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr., worked in GE’s advertising and publicity department in the early 1950s. He famously fictionalized his brother’s cool science in his classic Cat’s Cradle, where a substance called Ice-Nine freezes the seas.)
Langmuir and his team learned that snowflakes form when the temperature of water inside the clouds falls well below the freezing point and they come into contact with tiny ice crystals. On a hot summer day at GE’s Research Labs in Schenectady, NY in 1946, Schaefer dropped a large piece of frozen carbon dioxide, also known as dry ice, into his cold box to lower the temperature. He lined the box with black velvet so he could see better what happened when he shone a light beam inside. “In an instant, the air was full of ice crystals,” reported G-E Review.
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