Sunday, January 10, 2021
Yes, it worked.
In previous item I noted a brief report of an MIT fog control project in 1930, and wondered if it had succeeded.
Unlike Lodge, MIT wouldn't have been limited by inadequate supplies of HV charge. Van de Graaff's own lab was also at Round Hill. Can't get chargier than that!
But they apparently didn't take the static path. This article by MIT gives the details.
Houghton hypothesized that if a more moisture-absorbing chemical were introduced to the fog, water molecules would attach to the new compound, vapor pressure would drop, and the fog would dissipate. He scattered calcium chloride, an inexpensive compound with such properties, onto a dense layer of artificial fog and watched as the fog vanished. Field trials in which a calcium chloride solution was sprayed onto natural fog yielded similar results, but the technique wasn’t practical for clearing fog from sizable patches of land. To do that, and to counteract the way the wind pushed new fog in, Houghton suspended a 100- foot-long pipeline with downward-facing spray nozzles from 30 feet in the air. When set up perpendicular to wind direction, the apparatus shot a misty curtain of calcium chloride toward the ground, dispersing any fog rolling through. Spraying 2.5 gallons of the compound per second, Houghton’s machine took only three minutes to turn an area with visibility of less than 500 feet into one where “buildings more than a quarter-mile away were visible,” according to one report.In short, the MIT fog control project WORKED, and it worked by the same methods used in cloud-seeding. The article doesn't say why the effort was abandoned. The experimental system required too much salt, but a serious engineering effort could undoubtedly have improved the performance or found other alternatives. It appears that MIT just wasn't interested. They were mainly concerned with detection, not control. Later Houghton got tangled up in Cold War fakery, pushing for a weather control treaty because the Russkis might get there first.
“I shudder to think of the consequences of a prior Russian discovery of a feasible method of weather control,” Houghton said, although he’d previously been a voice of moderation on the plausibility of weather control. “International control of weather modification will be essential in the safety of the world as control of nuclear energy now is.”Same old story. We frame Russia for all of our evil, in order to avoid doing anything good or useful. Result: We do nothing but evil.
Labels: Patient things
¶ 9:06 PM
