NP Shared Fates

[davemarc]

Checking out the Time site I learned that Pat Paulsen had died.

I also noticed in yesterday's NYTimes that Bernard Vonnegut died.

BERNARD VONNEGUT, 82, PHYSICIST WHO COAXED RAIN FROM THE SKY
by Wolfgang Saxon

Bernard Vonnegut, a physicist and one of two researchers who first figured
out how to wring more raindrops from cloud cover for the croplands below,
died yesterday at St. Peter's Hospital in Albany.

The cause was cancer, said his brother, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the novelist.

Dr. Vonnegut was a distinguished professor emeritus of atmospheric sciences
at the State University of New York at Albany.  Although he formally
retired in 1985, he continued to work in his office at the university until
earlier this year.

His expertise in meteorological phenomena ran the gamut from lighting bolts
[sic] to tornadoes to updrafts and downdrafts in thunderstorms.  He
developed and explored theories about the role electrical charges play in
the formation of precipitation as well as in tornadoes.

Dr. Vonnegut was working at the General Electric Research Laboratory in
Schenectady when the technique of cloud seeding took flight in the 1940's. 
A colleague, Vincent J. Schaefer, discovered that a tiny grain of dry ice
produced many millions of ice crystals when dropped into a cloud of water
droplets below the freezing point.

Dr. Vonnegut soon established that silver iodide got better results in
nucleating clouds than did dry ice.  Since then, no other nucleating
process has been found that would rival theirs for making rain effectively.

Commercial rainmakers use the method today to control drought in parts of
the western United States, Australia and elsewhere.

But weather modification can also bring litigation.  Rainmaking companies,
meteorologists say, must move cautiously for fear of lawsuits from people
downwind, whose rain is being ambushed, or from others complaining of flood
conditions.

Dr. Vonnegut earlier teamed up with Dr. Schaefer and Irving Langmuir, the
G.E. Nobelist, in a project for the Army Signal Corps, attempting to turn
fog and clouds into rain and clearing overcast skies. 

He was born in Indianapolis, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in 1936, and received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry there
three years later.  He worked for industrial laboratories and at M.I.T.
before joining the G.E. labs in 1945.

In addition to his brother, Dr. Vonnegut is survived by five sons, Peter,
of Albany, Scott, of Bennington, Vt., Terrence and Kurt, both of Albany,
and Alex, of Cohoes, N.Y.; and five grandchildren.  His wife, Lois Bowler
Vonnegut, died in 1972.