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In their various fashions, the people of New Mexico had long prayed for rain. They were used to seeing the Rio Grande shrunk to a brookwide trickle, too thick to drink, too thin to plough. They were used to seeing their reservoirs low, their rolling ranges burned brown. Often they were forced to ship their cattle away to greener pastures. Many a sun-scorched New Mexican had said resignedly: "The Lord made the state dry. I guess He wants it that way."
Nevertheless, on the slopes above Socorro, a group of scientists thought it no impiety to see what could be done about changing New Mexico's weather. With a radar they searched the dark hearts of thunderclouds. Their potentiometers felt the pulse of lightning. They had a B-17 heavy-laden with strange apparatus, bristling with instruments like a flying porcupine. They had movie cameras, cylinders of butane and walkie-talkie radios.
And they were not the only ones. Last week, after July's plentiful rainfall, most of the state's cattle ranges were greening out. Farmers and ranchers in northeastern New Mexico gave the credit to a private rainmaking company which they had hired. All over the Southwest, and here & there throughout the rest of the U.S., a rainmaking boom was on. Many of the rainmakers were amateurs. But some were serious and hopeful scientists or hard-headed businessmen.
Reproachful Looks. In thirsty Arizona, the most successful is Charles Barnes of Phoenix, a first-class flying man who, with 17 airplanes equipped or being equipped for rainmaking, had seven projects going full blast from Texas to California. Another big rainmaker is Irving Krick of Pasadena, Calif., who has projects in New Mexico, Colorado, California, Idaho and Washington. Best publicized of the lot is Harvard's Dr. Wallace Howell, hired last March by New York City (at $100 a day for a maximum of 15 days a month) when the great reservoirs in the Catskills and Westchester County were far below normal and New Yorkers were being urged to save every dribble of water.
All of them worked on the principle of spraying dry ice or silver iodide into fat, moisture-laden clouds, forcing them to disgorge their watery vapors which fall as rain. The man behind the principle was an energetic, 69-year-old scientist named Dr. Irving Langmuir.
Until Irving Langmuir began poking into the subject, meteorology was a passive science. Meteorologists observed and tried to forecast the weather, but when asked why they didn't do something about it, they simply looked reproachful. Modern meteorological engineering—the technique of doing something about it—was born four years ago in Langmuir's General Electric laboratory at Schenectady.
Very Small & Very Large. No meteorologist to begin with, Brooklyn-born Irving Langmuir was educated at Columbia University and Gottingen in Germany, settled down to teach chemistry at Hoboken's Stevens Institute of Technology. In 1909 he joined General Electric's Research Laboratory, where he found the freedom he wanted to do research.