Schenectady, New York, was divided into three parts. South of downtown lay neat rows of modest homes, where almost all of the workers lived. In the east, just beyond the leafy campus of Union College, was the GE Realty Plot, where the managers and executives had stately homes. And in the center, just south of the Mohawk River, belching and clanking at the end of Erie Boulevard, were the machines.
The sprawling Schenectady Works, as the industrial complex was known, was GE’s world headquarters and one of its largest factories. A brick and steel compound ringed by a fence, the hulking, humming city within a city contained forty thousand employees in more than two hundred buildings. The Works had a hospital, a fire station, a power plant, and a foundry. It had clubhouses, restaurants, employee stores, its own sound studios, and a radio station, WGY. Blinking down on all of it through the smokestack haze was the sign atop Building 37: yellow letters ten feet tall spelling out “General Electric,” crowned by the giant red GE insignia. “The initials of a friend,” the company called its logo. Employees called it “the meatball.”
For the last three years, the Works had turned out the tools of war in quantities never before imagined. Now its three daily shifts cranked out the fruits of peace: the steam turbines, generators, motors, electrical equipment, and control systems that would help build the nation’s postwar prosperity. Americans and foreigners alike came to gape at the wonder of it. Tour groups clutching maps followed guides from building to building, wide-eyed at this mecca of American industry.
Bernard wanted to be close to work, but he didn’t want to live in the noisy, bustling factory town. Bow had grown up in a sylvan village in the Adirondacks. They had a dog that needed room to romp. He ran ads in the Schenectady Gazette for a farm or a home in the country. Postwar housing was tight, so when something came on the market that was almost in the country, he grabbed it. The house was in Alplaus, a tiny village right across the Mohawk River from Schenectady. It sat on the village’s main street but was set far back on a big lot, and one whole side hung out over a tangle of trees and vines at the edge of Alplaus Creek. It was a peaceful spot, just a short walk to the block-long village center, with its firehouse, grocery store, and post office at the back of a bike shop. Most of Alplaus’s residents worked for GE. It was a short drive to the Works, and if Bow needed the car, Bernie could take one of the daily buses that ran from Alplaus to the GE gate.
The buildings at the Works were numbered so people could navigate the sprawling complex, but Bernie was lucky: he only had to get himself to Building 5, right near the gate. The GE Research Lab’s cozy connection with management was reflected in its location right next door to Building 37, the main administration building; the two brick office blocks were connected by an arched sky bridge. In the midst of the sprawling Works, the Research Lab stood apart, a cluster of workrooms where brainy Ph.D.’s cooked up experiments with little regard for their practical value. It was a temple of science lodged in a city of trade. Yet the Research Lab was the branch of GE most essential to proving the company motto: “Progress is our most important product.”
The General Electric Research Laboratory was the brainchild of GE’s first celebrity scientist: Charles Proteus Steinmetz. A four-foot-tall, hunchbacked, cigar-puffing socialist, the eccentric Steinmetz was a mathematical and electrical genius who dominated GE in the early twentieth century. GE’s generators wouldn’t have been the same without him. One of the most famous stories told about Steinmetz is probably apocryphal, but it conveys the reverence in which he was held. Mid-career, the story goes, Steinmetz was called in to look at a broken generator in one of GE’s plants. Steinmetz asked for the generator’s mechanical drawings and spent a couple of days poring over them. Then he approached the machine and put his ear to it. After a few moments, he took out a piece of chalk and marked an X on the side. Open the generator there, he told the engineers, and remove so many turns of wire from its turbine. Asked the fee for his services, he said $1,000. Shocked by the amount, the plant engineers insisted on an itemized invoice. Steinmetz sent them a bill. It said,
Marking chalk “X” on side of generator: $1.
Knowing where to mark chalk “X”: $999.
That was Steinmetz’s particular genius: knowing where to mark the X. And yet the company was initially reluctant to embrace his plan for a research lab—until 1900, when GE patents began to expire. Facing the loss of market dominance in lightbulbs, management suddenly saw Steinmetz’s point: keeping a group of research scientists on the payroll meant anything they invented or discovered would be the property of GE.
Other industrial labs were narrowly focused on churning out new or improved products. GE’s was different. In a radical new approach to industrial research, the scientists worked only part of the time on practical tasks like coming up with new patentable types of lamp filaments. The rest of the time they were allowed to conduct pure research.
It was a fantastic success. Given the opportunity to explore freely, the scientists came up with all kinds of new inventions. By World War II, the GE Research Lab could claim responsibility for the electric range, transoceanic radio, the portable X-ray machine, the turbo-supercharged jet engine, and autopilot. Its contributions to both world war efforts further boosted its importance to a company whose growth was increasingly driven by government contracts. GE dubbed it “the House of Magic.” The scientists hated the name—they were doing science, not magic tricks—but the boys in PR loved it.
Bernard fit the place temperamentally. The Research Lab was sometimes described as having a university atmosphere. But in its early days, it was more like a salon, a mecca of what Bernie called Victorian science: the eccentric but brilliant researchers followed their curiosity wherever it took them, moving easily between physical, material, and even biological sciences. Having a Ph.D. in physics didn’t mean you couldn’t work in neurology if you liked; having a Nobel Prize in chemistry didn’t mean you left statistics to the mathematicians. The scientists discussed their work with each other in weekly cross-disciplinary presentations and frequently had far-flung hobbies outside the lab as well: Steinmetz had kept a greenhouse full of strange plants and a menagerie of deadly animals, including alligators, black widow spiders, and rattlesnakes. The lab’s director, Doc Whitney, was famous for his obsession with turtles. Albert Hull taught Greek before becoming a physicist and contributed the many classical coinages for the lab’s new inventions—thyratron, magnetron, kenotron, dynatron—that one inventor later dubbed “Graeco-Schenectady.” Irving Langmuir spent much of his spare time studying the hydrodynamics of the Adirondacks’ Lake George, where he had an island house, and his assistant Vincent Schaefer collected arrowheads, archaeological artifacts, and natural history specimens.
“Research is appreciation,” Doc Whitney liked to say. He often told the story of how, as a young professor at MIT, he had given students an assignment in which they combined the elements of sulfur and iron in a glass tube and heated them over a Bunsen burner. As the iron and sulfur combined into iron sulfide, the vessel was suffused with a bright glow. Students writing up the experiment almost inevitably reported that the elements had combined. When they did, Whitney would send them back to the lab with the instructions “Repeat and note the glow.”
Bernard never had to be told to note the glow. Like Whitney, he considered research an expression of appreciation for the natural world and its principles, and he couldn’t wait to get down to doing it. But almost as soon as he arrived in Schenectady, he was denied the opportunity. GE was on strike.
Almost before the VJ Day celebrations wound down, the nation was swept by a wave of strikes. Throughout the war, laborers had accepted wage controls and strike bans, even while upping production, and profits had soared. Workers expected corrective wage increases once the war was won. Instead, after VJ Day, employers, fearing the loss of government contracts, began laying off workers and cutting hours. So in the fall of 1945, union members across the nation—oilmen, coal miners, autoworkers, truckers, meatpackers, newspaper printers, phone and telegraph operators—began walking off their jobs.
Bernie probably hadn’t expected to see it happen at GE, any more than President Charlie Wilson had. The company was supposed to be a liberal, employee-friendly place: it was widely known that in 1937, while other corporations were fighting unionization, GE had willingly hammered out a contract with the United Electrical Workers. Employees called it the “Generous Electric Company”; management didn’t think its workers would strike over a smaller-than-requested pay raise. Yet in early January, a hundred thousand of them did.
The strike hobbled the entire company. Dozens of factories, including the Schenectady Works, were effectively shut down as picketing electrical workers denied access to everyone, including non-union, white-collar employees. Bernie, along with all the Research Lab scientists, was told to work from home.
Public opinion favored the striking workers. Desperate to avert a public relations disaster, GE settled with the union on a wage increase of eighteen and a half cents an hour. Now at last Bernie could start his new job—by looking around for a good problem to work on. If he didn’t find something quickly, someone would assign him something, and he preferred to choose a research project himself. So, after years of wartime interruption, he finally got his life back on track.
* * *
Chicago was a dream come true. Kurt and Jane’s apartment on Ellis Avenue was within walking distance of the university and from Walter and his wife, Helen, who lived on Lake Park Avenue. The cousins were frequently at each other’s homes or strolling down to Lake Michigan together. Kurt and Jane loved the lake. They loved having Walt and Helen in town, and they loved the university. Chicago was a heady place to be. The school had always been a magnet for leftists, skeptics, bohemians, and civil rights activists; now the issues raised by the bomb gave its intellectual life a new urgency. But Chicago’s thinkers weren’t wallowing in atomic dread. They were stepping up to help shape this new atomic age. Hyde Park buzzed with a new prospect: that, just as in H. G. Wells’s novel The World Set Free, humanity had learned its lesson at last.
Kurt and Jane embraced the idea. The horror of Hiroshima could at least bring this new hope: that human beings might finally change, might finally move beyond the outmoded nation-state and form a world government. If so, there might be hope for the elimination of war. Some scientists were even acting on their conviction that they must lead the way in renouncing violence. In the spring of 1946, as the government prepared to test atomic bombs by dropping them on a fleet of captured enemy ships at Bikini Atoll, some prominent scientists, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, refused to take part.
It was gratifying that Chicago was at the center of this movement. Chicago chancellor Robert Hutchins and physicist Leo Szilard were leading spokesmen for the world government cause. The Chicago-based Federation of American Scientists published the first issue of its journal, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the month after Kurt and Jane arrived. Soon after that, it put out the bestseller One World or None: A Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb, a collection of passionate essays advocating international control of atomic energy. Contributors included Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, Edward Condon, and Irving Langmuir.
Kurt’s own anthropology professor Robert Redfield had helped form the University Office of Inquiry into the Social Aspects of Atomic Energy and had joined Chicago’s Committee to Draft a World Constitution. He believed that the social sciences—especially anthropology—were going to be critical in helping humanity adjust its institutions for the new atomic age.
Kurt admired Redfield, whose work he began to follow when he switched his specialization to cultural anthropology. He had started off studying physical anthropology, which had charts and maps and measurements and all kinds of complicated theories, making it comforting to someone who valued scientific thinking. But there were also tedious scientific tasks, like measuring the size of early human brains by pouring grains of rice into their skulls, then measuring the rice. Disappointed, Kurt had gone to his adviser and confessed that the science bored him; he would rather study poetry. The adviser had recommended cultural anthropology, “poetry which pretends to be scientific.” Kurt liked the idea, and he threw himself into the new field.
He filled his notebooks with cramped notes: phases of different cultures; notes on cultivation, ceramics, human sacrifices, and metallurgy; ideas about literacy, agriculture, the development of moral orders. He learned about a vast array of cultures: Finns, Kazakhs, South Pacific Islanders, Mayans, Incas, ancient Chinese, Turks, Native Americans. He devoured journal articles, marking them up with red pencil. He studied Turkish linguistics. It was still rigorous and precise. But now all that precision was being directed toward something he actually cared about: not molecules or cells or atoms, but human beings and the cultures they made.
He was especially taken with Professor Redfield’s ideas about the changes and dislocations that result when small isolated communities—Redfield called them folk societies—evolve into sprawling, heterogeneous cultures. Culture, Professor Redfield declared, was in a constant state of flux; even the moral order was always forming, dissolving, re-forming. Culture wasn’t something that simply happened to humans; it was something they could tinker with. You could see it happening as the atomic age washed over Chicago and the university’s best minds worked on reshaping the culture to accommodate it.
Kurt could play his part in that by writing. So he attempted, once more, to write about his Dresden experience in an essay called “Wailing Shall Be in All Streets.” It was, like his letter home, pointed and concise. It began with an account of basic training and how the infantry were urged to “kill, kill, kill,” without being told very clearly why they were fighting. “A lot of people relished the idea of total war,” he wrote; “it had a modern ring to it, in keeping with our spectacular technology.” But the war, he wrote, had left him “sick at heart.” The reason was simple: “In February, 1945, Dresden, Germany, was destroyed, and with it over one hundred thousand human beings. I was there.”
I was there. It was something he would say again and again.
He went on to tell of his experience helping to find and burn bodies after the firestorm. But then the essay devolved into several pages of outright moralizing.
“There can be no doubt that the Allies fought on the side of right and the Germans and Japanese on the side of wrong. World War II was fought for near-Holy motives. But I stand convinced that the brand of justice in which we dealt, wholesale bombings of civilian populations, was blasphemous.”
He sent “Wailing” to The American Mercury, which rejected it, but editor Charles Angoff suggested Kurt send the magazine something else.
He tried a different tack in an essay called “I Shall Not Want,” where he tried to convey what it felt like to starve. Here he tried to keep the tone light, thinking maybe he could sell it to Gourmet. Some parts worked, such as his account of how the prisoners kept journals full of fantastical descriptions of meals they would eat once free, arguing about whose imagined menus were best. But other parts were over-formal, tendentious even. Jane went through it with a pen, striking out stilted constructions and wordiness. It helped, but not enough. Kurt sent it off to The New Republic’s college essay contest. The prize was a summer internship at the magazine. He didn’t win.
In July, Kurt and Jane vacationed at Lake Maxinkuckee with Walt, Helen, and their baby son, Kit; Kurt and Jane were his godparents. The two couples played cards and stayed up late talking about politics. That month, Congress passed an act creating the Atomic Energy Commission. It felt hopeful: like the first step on the road away from madness and toward sanity through world government.
* * *
Not long after his arrival at GE, Bernie dropped in on the lab of his old deicing acquaintances. Irving Langmuir was away for most of the spring, giving the prestigious Hitchcock Lectures at Berkeley, but Vincent Schaefer was in Schenectady, moving forward with their new investigations. Bernie told Vince that he had grown interested in the process of supercooling: lowering the temperature of a liquid or gas without converting it to a solid. Vince said he and Irving were working on the same thing. Specifically, they were trying to figure out if they could manufacture snow.
Snow had brought Vincent Schaefer and Irving Langmuir together. Vince was president of the Schenectady Wintersports Club, and Irving, who also adored skiing, was a member. In the early 1930s, Vince got the idea of sponsoring a snow train for skiers out of Schenectady. Irving, an avid pilot, offered to take him up to look for likely routes in his open-cockpit Waco plane. Before long, the startled Vince found himself flying the plane—banking, turning, diving, even practicing stalling and recovering, all under the tutelage of the brilliant scientist. They flew over the Catskills and scouted out ski hills. By the time they landed, Vince was groggy with incipient hypothermia. Langmuir took the younger man to his own house, and Marion, Irving’s wife, fed him hot tea and cookies until he felt better.
To some people, Vince seemed an unlikely assistant for Irving Langmuir: he had never even finished high school. His father was sickly, and Vince had to leave school at sixteen in order to help support the family. On the advice of an uncle, he joined the GE apprentice program and trained as a machinist, landing a job as a drill press operator. Eventually graduating to model maker for the Research Lab, he quickly became known as the person who could put together any kind of apparatus the scientists needed. Intelligent, ambitious, and with a burning desire to be a “real” scientist, he was soon not simply making lab machinery but helping in the design of experiments.
In 1932, when Langmuir’s old assistant retired, Vincent became his right-hand man. Vince called Irving “the Boss,” but they were really scientific partners. Irving put little stock in degrees or credentials: he cared about whether a person was curious and thoughtful. Bernie was the same way: it never seemed odd to him that Vince had made himself indispensable.
Like Bernie, Irving and Vince had grown intrigued by supercooling during the war. In their work on precipitation static, they had attempted to conduct experiments at the research station on New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, home to some of the worst weather in the world. One day, as they were hiking up—they preferred to hike up and ski out when they had work to do at the summit—Langmuir stopped and indicated some clouds that hovered on the mountain’s peak. They were heavy and ominous, but only one lone snowflake drifted to the ground.
“Look, Vince,” he said. “With all these clouds everywhere, there’s only a flake here and a flake there. Why? I think we ought to do some more studies on that.”
They knew that the clouds on the mountain peak were often supercooled. Objects at the summit research station could amass ice three feet thick without a drop of rain or snow falling. Irving intuited that this must happen because the clouds passing over the peak contained large numbers of water droplets that were colder than 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Those droplets didn’t freeze until something disturbed them, such as sudden contact with a metal surface. It was the same process that caused airplanes to accumulate ice when flying through supercooled clouds. But were there ways to force the supercooled water droplets in a cloud to freeze spontaneously, after which they would fall as snow or rain?
People have dreamed of inducing precipitation for as long as they have been thirsty. But efforts to make rain were usually mystical, not scientific. Military men had long claimed that rain tended to fall after big battles, leading to the idea that firing cannons into the sky might “bust” the clouds. In the nineteenth century, some scientists argued that filling the air with particulate matter was likely to bring down rain; James Pollard Espy, the nation’s first government meteorologist, proposed burning large swaths of the nation’s forests to make rain for the arid West. But most purported rainmakers were charlatans and con men. No one really knew how to make rain because no one understood how rain happened.
Snow and rain seem like some of the most basic phenomena on the planet, yet they were still largely mysterious. Meteorologists knew that clouds form when moist air cools to its dew point, converting its water vapor to cloud droplets. At some point, some of those droplets would convert to ice crystals. The ice crystals would collect water and grow until they were heavy enough to fall. But what made those first droplets turn to ice?
In the 1930s, the meteorologist Walter Findeisen proposed that they required a nucleus—a small atmospheric particle of dust or salt spray for the water to cling to. Findeisen suggested that if he was right, it should be possible to introduce artificial nuclei into clouds to stimulate rain. Langmuir and Schaefer had not yet read Findeisen’s foundational work; they preferred to start their work with experiments, rather than the literature. But they had guessed correctly that the cloud droplets require a nucleus to convert to ice. So, with the war over, they had decided to test different chemical substances for their ability to do just that.
Because Vince was already conducting experiments on supercooled water, Bernie decided that he would focus on supercooled metals. But he kept in touch, dropping in on Vince periodically to see how he was progressing. In the early summer, Vince had an idea that was startlingly simple. He requisitioned a GE chest freezer. When it arrived, he lined it with black velvet and aimed a light at its innards. He chilled it to 10 degrees below freezing and breathed into it, and voilà—his breath made a cloud! Because cold air is heavier than warm, the cloud stayed there in the freezer, even with the lid open. Now, with a laboratory cloud, he could begin trying to make laboratory snow.
For several weeks, Vince assailed his cloud with substances that might function as ice nuclei: sulfur, magnesium oxide, volcanic dust, talc, diatomaceous earth. As the summer heated up, his lab partner Katharine Blodgett—the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge University—noted that his experiment was cleverly timed: it required him to spend sweltering days in the lab hanging the upper half of his body into a freezer. But one day in July, it got so hot the freezer couldn’t keep up. To get his freezer back down to the right temperature quickly, Vincent got a large block of dry ice, which the Research Lab always had on hand, and threw it in. To his surprise, the entire cloud inside instantly converted into shimmering crystals of snow. After all the substances he’d tried, dry ice—nothing more than solid carbon dioxide—had nucleated the cloud.
Vincent wrote up the experiment in his lab notebook: “I have just finished a set of experiments in the laboratory which I believe points out the mechanism for the production of myriads of ice crystals.” When he wandered into the adjoining lab, he was less circumspect. To the astonished scientists he announced, “Now I know how to make it snow.”
When Langmuir returned to Schenectady in late July, Vincent showed him the freezer experiment. The Boss saw the point at once. In his GE lab notebook he wrote, “Control of Weather.”
They both knew this was their next big project. Irving had recently heard that his name was on the list of prominent figures President Truman was considering to head up the Atomic Energy Commission. But now nothing could be further from his mind than atomic bombs and nuclear power. He was onto something even more important. In his small notebook, he recorded his plans. They would fly to the tops of clouds and seed them with pellets of dry ice or a stream of liquid carbon dioxide. They would make flights through various types of clouds measuring wind speed, temperatures, vertical currents, and the distribution of water droplets. “Develop theory of growth of rain drops,” he wrote. “Can we cause cloud of uniform droplets to give rain?”
He spoke to Guy Suits about getting a plane. But he would also need instruments to record all the data they would collect. Then he had another thought.
“What is Vonnegut doing?”
* * *
On the last day of August 1946, The New Yorker dedicated its entire issue to John Hersey’s thirty-one-thousand-word article “Hiroshima.” Rather than report on the event in the traditional way, Hersey followed six characters in detail from the moments just before the bomb fell, documenting their activities in the horrific days that followed. Written in a flat, almost clinical tone that avoids overt moralizing or rhetorical flourish, the piece piles detail upon detail until the cumulative result is far more harrowing than any attempt to sermonize. The issue sold out at newsstands in a few hours. Rarely has a magazine piece—which soon became a book—caused such powerful soul-searching. Albert Einstein sent a thousand copies to fellow scientists, urging them to consider its implications.
It was the sort of response Kurt would have liked to provoke with “Wailing Shall Be in All Streets.” But his little piece on Dresden was not gaining traction. After The American Mercury rejected it, he sent it to Harper’s, The Atlantic, Time, and The Yale Review. Edward Weeks at The Atlantic was positive enough that Kurt revised it and sent it again. But in the end, no one wanted it. He threw himself back into his anthropology studies at Chicago.
And then, before the fall semester could even get going, Jane told him she was pregnant. It had happened: an atom of Kurt and an atom of Jane had smashed together and split into two new cells. Two to four to eight to sixteen to thirty-two and on and on—a chain reaction bringing life, not death.
She would drop out of school. That’s what women did. Together they went looking for her adviser, a gloomy Russian who had fled Stalin and washed up on the shore of Lake Michigan to bestow the pearls of Russian culture on frat boys, ex-GIs, and coeds. They found him in the library. Jane told him she was going to resign her scholarship and drop out of grad school. And then—she couldn’t help it—she broke down and wept.
“Mrs. Vonnegut, pregnancy is the beginning of life, not the end of it,” he sniffed.
Yes, it was a beginning, the beginning of a life they had imagined together, their married life with seven kids. But it felt like the end of something too. They shared so many dreams: to write, to learn, to travel, to help cure an ailing world. Having seven kids was among their dreams, but now it was cutting to the head of the line, especially for Jane.
* * *
When he heard the whine of an airplane over the village of Alplaus, Bernie rushed outside. He had come home for lunch; his house was just a mile from the airport. Vince and Irving were still at the airstrip, experimenting. In fact, that might be Vince overhead. Bernie peered at the airplane intently. Sure enough, a long unnatural trail of something that looked like ice crystals was streaming out behind it. He ran for his camera.
Bernie was now officially part of Langmuir and Schaefer’s team. They had invited him to join them soon after Schaefer’s freezer experiment. For months now, Vince had been conducting more freezer tests while Bernie scoured the crystallographic tables, trying to find other substances that might nucleate ice crystals. Meanwhile, Langmuir was filling his notebook with theoretical calculations of the number and size of snow crystals likely to be produced in different circumstances.
They had all been longing to try out dry ice nucleation on a real cloud. But the fall had been frustratingly mild: sunny, warm days, with barely a cloud to speak of in the heavens. The bright blue Schenectady skies deepened to a rich royal tone at dusk, and the stars blinked the promise of another clear day. Every morning, Vincent was up at dawn, scanning hopefully for clouds. He told the others he was so eager to test his theory he couldn’t sleep.
By November 12, unable to bear the suspense, they had decided to make a practice flight. They rented a single-engine Fairchild plane and got Curtis Talbot of the GE test flight division to fly it. Using a motorized dispenser he had designed, Vince released crushed dry ice into cumulus clouds at three to five thousand feet. But the cloud temperature was nowhere near cold enough to produce snow. There were some more promising stratus clouds at around twelve thousand feet, but Talbot told them the single-engine plane could go no higher than ten thousand feet.
A day later, the weather had finally given them what they wanted. The temperature was around freezing, and the sky to the east and north of Schenectady was filled with parallel bands of thick stratus clouds. An excited Vince had called Talbot as soon as he stepped outside, then driven to the local dairy and bought six pounds of crushed dry ice. Now he was up there, dispensing it.
Bernie retrieved his camera and went back outside. He fumbled with the aperture setting, then searched the sky again for Curtis and Vince in the Fairchild. Langmuir had had a two-way radio installed on the plane after the previous day’s flight, so he was probably talking to them now from the tower.
The plane Bernie was watching flew in an odd pattern, the trail of snow behind it tracing its path. The path was growing more elaborate. It almost looked like a P. Then it looked like an E. Suddenly his heart sank.
P … E … P … S … I …
It was not Vince and Curtis at all. Bernie couldn’t help but laugh at himself. Ruefully, he went inside and put his camera away.
But when he got back to the lab, everything was in an uproar. Vincent had not done any skywriting that morning. He had done something even better: he had made snow.
Irving and Vince recounted the story over and over. The stratus clouds were high up in the sky, so after takeoff Curtis had begun climbing, taking forty minutes to reach ten thousand feet. Vince spotted a promising cloud in the vicinity of Mount Greylock, over the Massachusetts border. Its base was well above them at around thirteen thousand feet.
“Can we get to it?” he asked Talbot. Curtis, getting into the spirit, nodded and urged the little plane upward.
The plane’s single propeller churned away. It seemed to take forever. The last four thousand feet took half an hour to climb. Looking into the cloud, Vincent saw shimmering iridescent ice crystals around its edges—a sign that the inside was probably supercooled. He checked the thermometer. It read −17.5 degrees, and its bulb was beginning to ice over. Curtis swung the airplane around, and they flew into the cloud. Vincent dispensed three pounds of dry ice. Then his ice dispenser jammed. He was breathing heavily. His head swam, and his heart pounded—the effects of altitude in the unpressurized plane. He picked up the cardboard box and opened the Fairchild’s window. Wind sucked the remaining dry ice into the white.
After that, they made a big loop and flew back through the cloud again. This time, they were surrounded by glinting crystals of snow.
“We did it!” Vince cried over the roar of the engines. He and Curtis shook hands on their triumph.
In the tower, Langmuir had his field glasses glued to his eyes. Shortly after the plane disappeared into it, the cloud almost seemed to explode. Then it began to split horizontally, dividing into two parallel clouds. Falling from the space between them were long streamers of snow.
“It works,” Irving wrote in his notebook. When the plane landed, he rushed across the tarmac to greet Vince.
“This is history,” he said.
Back at the lab, the normally reserved Langmuir could hardly contain himself, glowing with excitement as he described the snow they had made.
“I could see it forty miles away,” he marveled.
Guy Suits pointed out that they would soon need a better plane to continue the experiments. He had worked closely with the military during the war, heading up GE’s war research division, and had many close contacts there. He proposed bringing in General Curtis LeMay. Surely the Air Force would be interested in a technique for dissipating fog and clouds.
Before long, the phones were ringing. GE’s publicity department, the News Bureau, was staffed with real journalists, and like reporters everywhere they had a nose for breaking news. Before long, two men from the News Bureau had arrived at Building 5 with portable typewriters and were tapping away as fast as Langmuir could talk. The PR men returned to the News Bureau that evening, bursting with reports of man-made snow. An assistant editor at The GE Monogram—the company’s in-house magazine for managers—was there to hear the tale.
“Well, Schaefer made it snow this afternoon over Pittsfield!” he reported to his colleagues back at the Monogram. “Next week he walks on water.”
The GE press release went to the papers the very next day: “Scientists of the General Electric Company, flying an airplane over Greylock Mountain in western Massachusetts yesterday, conducted experiments with a cloud three miles long, and were successful in transforming the cloud into snow.”
The release quoted Langmuir’s estimate that a single pellet of dry ice the size of a pea “might produce enough ice nuclei to develop several tons of snow.” He went on to give a primer in cloud physics. When a cloud was seeded and its water droplets froze, he said, latent heat was released. Ironically, the freezing process generated heat in the cloud, which would produce turbulence, the kind that causes cumulus clouds in thunderstorms to billow upward. The turbulence, he said, “enables the process to spread as a type of chain reaction and draws more moisture into the active region.”
It was typical of Langmuir’s brilliance that, although not trained as a meteorologist, he had intuited something fundamental about clouds. They are not, as most people think, reservoirs of water hanging out in the sky. They are hives of activity, constantly taking on water vapor from the atmosphere, the ground and surface water, and sometimes converting that water to precipitation. Langmuir had figured out that seeding did more than force clouds to release stored water. It could literally make clouds more efficient. He and Schaefer had discovered a method not of “milking the skies,” as it was sometimes described. They had found a way to build better clouds.
The newsmen were less interested in cloud physics than in what this all meant for the man on the street. They packed the press release with thrilling claims. Scientists could now fill reservoirs, deliver more water to hydroelectric dams, clear dangerous clouds that iced airplanes, make snow over ski resorts, and divert storms from urban areas. A new era of managed climate was dawning.
It was headline news. “Snowstorm Manufactured,” announced The Boston Globe in inch-high banner type. “Three-Mile Cloud Made into Snow by Dry Ice Dropped from Plane,” said The New York Times. “Man Does Something About Weather—Makes It Snow,” declared the New York Post, and Newsweek quipped, “Deliver One Blizzard.” Time described the event as if the dry ice had been an atomic bomb and the cloud had succumbed to radiation sickness: “Almost at once the cloud, which had been drifting along peacefully, began to writhe in torment. White pustules rose from its surface. In five minutes the whole cloud melted away, leaving a thin wraith of snow.”
File clerks struggled to keep pace as more than ten thousand clippings descended upon GE. Delighted newsmen took publicity photographs of the News Bureau snowed under with news.
For Bernie, Vince, and Irving, the next few weeks were a whirlwind. Letters and telegrams poured into the Research Lab. It seemed almost everyone had ideas about how to use this fabulous new tool. Airline meteorologists wanted to dispel icing clouds and dissipate fogs. Water managers and irrigation districts wanted to produce more rain. A Chilean government agency requested a team of GE scientists to draw up a plan for fixing Chile’s arid areas. A U.S. Marine Air Corps navigator offered to fly the GE scientists to Seattle to dispel fog that was slowing rescue efforts for a plane that had crashed near Mount Rainier. Ski clubs and ski resorts offered their slopes to further the work. A classroom of California schoolkids sent postcards requesting a snowstorm. A film crew wanted snow for a shoot in Buffalo. Buffalo itself wanted snow sent back over Lake Erie.
There were naysayers, but not many. The Boston Herald editorialized that “bringing more snow to snowy New England is very much like carrying coals to Newcastle … Can the General Electric create a snow-repellant as well as a snow-producer?” A columnist in the New York Sun had more philosophical objections to monkeying with nature, asking, “Who wants to see a child look out the window at the crystals from fairyland on a winter morning and exclaim, ‘Oh, mumsy! Look what General Electric is doing’?” Vincent, riding high on his new fame, sent the columnist a sardonic apology, claiming that he was “repenting inside the igloo doghouse” to which he’d been consigned and assuring the columnist that “the day will never come when each and every snowflake carries a G-E monogram.”
But most of the world seemed giddy at the prospect of GE snow. And why not? Only a year earlier, scientists had harnessed the most fundamental power in the universe and used it to end a seemingly endless war. Why shouldn’t they move on from mastery of atoms to atmosphere? This was just the next step in man’s taking control of nature.
One letter sounded a different theme, one of particular interest to Guy Suits. Simon Goldstein, an insurance broker from New York City, wrote to warn GE about the many injurious effects that a manufactured snowfall might cause: car accidents, falls, floods, property damage, even the expense of snow removal. “This is likely to produce lawsuits against your Company,” he wrote. “It would therefore seem dangerous to leave yourselves unprotected in these circumstances. May I hear from you?”
* * *
“Time to go home, Barney,” Katharine Blodgett called out as she gathered her things. It was 5:30, and everyone else had already left. But Barney—Bernard’s undergraduate nickname had followed him to GE—was huddled over Vincent’s freezer. Approaching him, Katharine realized he wasn’t likely to be heading home anytime soon. He was on the trail of something interesting and was determined to see it through.
That was the quality in Bernie that made him such a good scientist—and also at times such a frustrating husband, father, or brother. Once he got some new idea in his teeth, no force on earth could tear him away from it. Now his obsessive nature was zeroing in on a new method of cloud seeding: silver iodide.
He had paged through the entire crystallographic handbook, looking for things with crystal structures similar to water. He had found three promising substances and tried them in Vince’s freezer. Only one seemed to have any effect. So he had been trying it in different forms, including smoke. When he vaporized silver iodide, it worked like a charm. Not only that, but the ice nuclei created with silver iodide lasted for half an hour or more. They lasted even after more moist air was added to the freezer. The effect was as striking as what happened with dry ice, and it was likely to be even more durable.
He was trying, he told Katharine, to figure out if silver alone would do the trick, or iodine alone, or if it had to be silver iodide. He had hours of experimenting to do, and he wasn’t about to stop now. Bernie would stay in the lab for as long as it took, because he was onto something big. Dry ice seeding was causing a national sensation. But Bernie might have found something even better.
The next time Vincent went up in the Fairchild, Bernie went with him. They conducted two days’ worth of inconclusive tests with dry ice. On the second day, Vincent thought perhaps they had over-seeded the cloud, producing so many ice nuclei that they were too small and light to fall. But Bernie couldn’t help but notice that even when their seedings produced immediate and dramatic results, they did not propagate further snow. Dry ice worked, but only for a short time.
Back in the lab, he built a small smoke generator based on the ones Langmuir and Schaefer had made during the war. He put silver iodide in it and ran it for fifteen seconds, and the lab filled with nuclei. When he blew a puff of air into the freezer, it filled with ice crystals. The effect persisted for an hour. Bernie put the device on a windowsill and let it blow silver iodide smoke out into the atmosphere. But it was late in the day and dark, so there was no telling if the chemical had any effect on the clouds.
In early December, Bernie, Irving, and Vince met with the Army. After a formal lunch downtown at the Hotel Van Curler, they gave Dr. Michael Ference of the Signal Corps a tour of the lab. Vincent created an ice crystal fog in the freezer. Bernard brought a balloon filled with silver iodide smoke he had produced in the boiler of Building 37, and they created another round of ice crystals with that. Ference was impressed. He thought they could work out a contract for at least a year, including the long-term loan of a bomber plane and its crew.
On December 20, Vincent and Curtis went up in the Fairchild again. Bernie and Irving were in the tower, but the airplane radio failed, so they had to wait for the plane’s return to hear how the seeding went. After landing, Vince reported that they had made four runs dispensing dry ice and liquid carbon dioxide. On their way back to the airport, they saw a new cloud full of fine crystalline snow hanging just below the cloud deck. They figured it had been made by seeding.
The first snowflakes fell shortly afterward. Snow fell all afternoon and into the evening. By the time it stopped, around 11:00 p.m., Schenectady was buried under nearly ten inches of snow.
“A very interesting storm,” Langmuir wrote in his notebook.
For the next couple of days, they researched it. Bernie collected data on snowfall times and measurements for all Weather Bureau stations within two hundred miles of Schenectady. They made maps showing the storm’s development. Irving woke up before dawn with equations filling his head, waiting until 9:00 a.m. before calling Vincent or Bernie to talk it through. Once they felt certain, Irving called Guy Suits and told him what they had concluded: their seeding had caused the unusually heavy snowfall in the Schenectady region and beyond.
Suits told him not to tell anyone.
But on the day after Christmas, Irving wrote to C. N. Touart in the Air Weather Service of the Army Air Forces. “Schaefer made some seeding runs Friday morning, Dec. 20,” he wrote, “which look as though they may have produced wide-spread effects upon the development of the snow storm that swept over parts of New York state and New England.” If Suits didn’t want to go public, the best way to ensure continued research was to keep the military interested.
* * *
The meteorologist Harry Wexler, chief of scientific services for the U.S. Weather Bureau, respectably liveried in flannel suit and wire-framed glasses, sat up in his conference chair and gaped. He had come to Boston to learn what could be learned for the good of his governmental agency, but he hadn’t expected anything as dramatic as this. At the front of the room, Vincent Schaefer was showing slides of man-made snow while Irving Langmuir predicted GE’s imminent victory over the climate.
Wexler was at the joint meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Meteorological Society (AMS). The whole conference was abuzz with the GE scientists’ bombshell. The night before, GE had hosted a cocktail reception in the Georgian Room of the posh Statler Hotel. Vincent had brought the laboratory freezer he had used to make his early experiments, and as the assembled reporters and scientists drew near, he had breathed into the box to create a cloud. Ice cubes rattled in glasses as the gods of this miniature world waved their hands and filled its sky with shimmering snow.
Now Langmuir was talking in sweeping terms about their experiments outdoors and what would come next: deserts would bloom, storms would be quelled, snow would fall where people wanted it and not where they didn’t. After the official paper was over, he spoke even more broadly. He told people about the flight of December 20 and the unusual snowfall that had followed. Cloud seeding, he was telling people, had created a spectacular snowstorm.
Harry Wexler had studied meteorology at MIT, under the supervision of pioneering Swedish meteorologist Carl-Gustaf Rossby, and gone on to become an editor at the Journal of Meteorology and a member of the council of the AMS. He had joined the Weather Bureau in 1934, and he was now on a mission to bring the new, mathematically rigorous meteorology of the Scandinavians to the United States. He had an ally in the Weather Bureau chief, Francis Reichelderfer. Long a bastion of old-school weather mapping and forecasting, the government’s weather service was undergoing a makeover under Chief Reichelderfer. He was going to drag it—kicking and screaming, if necessary—into the new scientific age.
As Harry and Chief Reichelderfer saw it, the facts were simple. The laws of physics underlay all weather, from the tropical hurricane to the sudden gust of wind. The planet spun, the sun shone, the tides rose and fell, the winds blew, all of it following basic equations of hydrodynamics that had been around for two hundred years. With enough study, it must be possible to come up with a mathematical model of the atmosphere that would enable accurate forecasts of its future behavior. This, after all, was the scientific revolution’s great insight: that the universe could be described—all of it—in purely numerical terms. In other words, it was knowable, and if it was knowable, it was predictable.
Scientists had a name for this insight: the clockwork universe. In 1814, the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace had imagined a creature intelligent enough to “comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated … an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis.” For that creature, “nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.” Scientists had made up a name for this mystical being with perfect knowledge. They called it “Laplace’s demon.”
Harry Wexler had dreamed of being able to modify the weather. What meteorologist hadn’t? But one of his favorite quotations was from Ben Franklin: “He who would master nature must obey her laws. He must learn her laws and then obey them.” If weather control ever became real, Wexler knew it would be the result of what he had dedicated his life to: learning the physical dynamics of the atmosphere. It would happen when humans had learned enough to become like Laplace’s demon. That’s what the atomic scientists had done: they mastered nature’s laws to master nature. But here, at the AMS meeting, scientists who knew nothing about the mathematics of atmospheric circulation were announcing they could make snow—when they didn’t even know how nature made snow! It was as if the nuclear physicists of 1942 had been approached by a couple of chemists who claimed to have gone outside and smashed some atoms.
The GE scientists’ revelations were the “outstanding contribution” of the meeting, Harry Wexler reported to Chief Reichelderfer. But they were meteorologically naive, and their approach was downright primitive. The real way to take charge of the climate was through something more rigorous—like the ten nonlinear equations on punch cards Harry had right there in his briefcase. He had brought them to Boston to see if he could get some time on Harvard’s high-speed calculating machine. Once the equations were solved, he would take them back to Princeton, New Jersey, where the Weather Bureau was taking part in an all-out mathematical attack on the weather. Because as Harry Wexler saw it, the future was not in experiments but in equations—equations so complex they had to be worked out by an artificial brain. Laplace’s demon might finally be coming to life, not at GE, or in any human mind, but in the tiny, electrically ignited glow of a vacuum tube.
* * *
“I promise to scrub the bathroom and kitchen floors once a week,” Kurt typed, “on a day and hour of my own choosing. Not only that, but I will do a good and thorough job, and by that she means that I will get under the bathtub, behind the toilet, under the sink, under the icebox, into the corners; and I will pick up and put in some other location whatever moveable objects happen to be on said floors.”
The baby wasn’t even born yet, but things would never be the same. Jane missed going to class, and she had terrible morning sickness. She pestered Kurt so much about the household chores that in January he finally typed up a contract in which he promised, in addition to scrubbing the kitchen and bathroom floors weekly, to take out the garbage promptly, hang up his clothes, and refrain from putting out his cigarettes or dumping his ashes in wastebaskets. If he failed in these duties, Jane was “to feel free to nag, heckle or otherwise disturb me until I am driven to scrub the floors anyway—no matter how busy I am.”
And he was busy. With the baby coming, Kurt had taken on a job in addition to his schoolwork. He was moonlighting for the City News Bureau, the team of crack reporters who provided much of the copy for Chicago’s papers. He wasn’t experienced enough to be taken on as a reporter, so he was toiling away as a copy boy on the night shift. He’d come home for a few hours’ sleep before going off to classes.
He was happy to be back in a newsroom again. But the move was driven more by necessity than desire. He was a family breadwinner now.
It was exhausting, but he still loved Chicago. It all seemed so relevant. A foolish fight might be raging in Congress over whether David Lilienthal was sufficiently anticommunist to head up the new Atomic Energy Commission, but Chicago thinkers were already past such ridiculousness and hashing out a draft of a world constitution. In the anthropology department too, Kurt felt as if he had found a sort of extended family. It was a small community working together to figure out big questions about people and their cultures. He wanted to be part of it, to be one of them.
He finished up his contract with Jane by declaring it effective until the baby was born, “when my wife will once again be in full possession of all her faculties, and able to undertake more arduous pursuits than are now advisable.” He was looking forward to that.
Somehow Kurt managed to paint: he exhibited three paintings in an open student exhibition on campus. None of them sold. No matter. He bragged about the exhibition in a letter to Walt and Helen. The point of doing art was doing art. He was his own man now, finally freed from the hyperrational world of science to focus on what he really cared about: human beings.