What is the history of cloud seeding

Let's start learning about cloud seeding!  

The history of cloud seeding.

Cloud seeding is an example of serendipity. Serendipity means those things that are invented by chance, but they end up benefiting us. In the year 1943 Dr. Vincent Joseph Shaefer who was an American meteorologist and chemist.

He was researching the Aircraft icing and precipitation. In the year 1946 he used a cold box, a box that was very cold, for his research. While testing something he breathed out into the cold box. As you know, sometimes when we breathe out in cold weather something like fog or smoke comes out of our mouth; that smoke contains water vapor. He saw the same thing happening during his experiment. You may also have done this; when you breathe out in the cold you see some smoke type thing coming out of your mouth. These are the small, tiny water droplets, the water vapor coming out of your mouth condenses into tiny droplets, this is the same process that happens in the clouds at their last stage. It is not wrong to say that the fog that comes from your mouth is like a mini cloud.  

Dr. Shaefer noticed this thing and took this one step further. He thought to cool down the box further and for this he used dry ice (solid form of carbon dioxide). It is also used in refrigerators for cooling. The existing temperature of dry ice is –78-degree Celsius. He placed some dry ice in that box and again breathed out into that box. He saw some miraculous, he saw the air that blew out of his mouth turned into many microscopic crystals of ice, millions of ice crystals, creating a blueish type of haze. Then he noticed that if that much temperature is suddenly reduced, the water vapors will convert into ice crystals very quickly. This happens in the cloud at the last stage, when the ice crystals get heavy. He saw that by using the dry ice this process is happening more quickly. He immediately started conducting more experiments on this to understand it. Finally, when he understood what was happening. He thought that it could be useful in real life, if it is used. We should try to cool the clouds in the sky instantly so that we can get rain or snowfall instantly.  

On the 13 of November 1946, he conducted an experiment with this, he flew a plane from New York, the plane he flew contained almost 2.5 kg of dry ice. He tested it on a cloud near the Mountain Greylock. He threw dry ice in the crushed ice out of that plane, and he saw some amazing results. He saw suddenly heavy rain and snowfall started and this is the point where cloud seeding was invented.