Dr Shaefer immediately conducted more experiments to understand what was happening exactly. Finally, when he understood things, he realized that it can be used in real life as well. Why not try to instantly cool the clouds in the sky by using dry ice, so that we can get instant snowfall or rain. On 13th November 1946, Dr Shaefer flew a plane from New York. He took 2.5 kg of dry ice with him on this flight and conducted his test on a cloud near Mount Greylock.
He threw crushed dry ice out of the plane, on top of the clouds, and the result was amazing. He saw instant heavy snowfall and rain. And this was the invention of Cloud Seeding.
Today, Dr Vincent Shaefer is credited for the inventing cloud seeding. But before him, there was another man Wilhelm Reich, he claimed to have invented a cloudbuster machine in America. He claimed that by using Orgone energy, by using cosmic energy, he could manipulate the atmosphere and cause rain. He named his research Cosmic Orgone Engineering.
But as you can guess, he was a person who made fraudulent claims. His machine didn’t work at all It was simply a way to steal the credit. Interestingly, there was another scientist apart from Dr Shaefer who was working on cloud seeding technology but from a completely different perspective.
