Getting Organized -21- 



So important was photography considered in the active phase of the 

 project, when the Operations Group was functioning and regular test flights 

 were being conducted, that many civilian professional photographers were 

 employed in addition to those provided by the Signal Corps. On the second 

 New Mexico test operation, six photographers made the trip from Schenectady 

 to Albuquerque. During the Puerto Rican test operation, over 100,000 

 frames of lapse -time pictures were taken in color. The load on the darkroom 

 at the General Electric hangar in Schenectady became so great that a photo- 

 graphic trailer was obtained from the Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories 

 to relieve the congestion. 



One print of each photograph was, at the time of the preparation of 

 this report, on file in the Knolls penthouse weather station, plus virtually 

 all motion pictures (some are in the possession of Schaefer). All negatives 

 are filed in the photographic vaults of the Signal Corps Laboratory at 

 Eelmar, New Jersey. 



INSTRUMENTATION 



A considerable portion of the time and activity of Project Cirrus per- 

 sonnel was spent on the development of special instruments, tools, and equip- 

 ment essential to the project. As in any new undertaking in which there is 

 little or no previous experience, many new devices of this type had to be 

 designed, or old ones had to be adapted to special requirements. In addi- 

 tion to Schaefer's simple cold chamber, which became a standard item of 

 meteorological research in the field of cloud physics, the more important 

 equipment of this type follows: 



Dry Ice Dispenser . One of the first instruments which had to be de- 

 veloped was an automatic dry ice dispenser. (75) This was devised 

 (Schaefer -Falconer -Kearsley) for use in an airplane, to allow a continuous 

 release of dry-ice pellets during seeding operations. 



Dry Ice Crusher . This was a device (Schaefer -Falconer -Kearsley) 

 for reducing blocks of dry ice to usable fragments for seeding purposes.^'"' 

 It greatly reduced the time required for preparing this material for a 

 seeding run. 



Silver Iodide Generators . A number of different methods for the gen- 

 eration of silver-iodide smokes were studied by Vonnegut early in the his- 

 tory of the project. One method vaporized silver iodide from a hot fila- 

 ment.'^ - ' Another involved the use of a small electric furnace.^ '' A 

 third method vaporized silver iodide from a string in a flame and then 

 caused a very fine smoke by rapidly quenching the flame with a blast of 

 compressed air. (56) A fourth introduced silver iodide into flares of the 



