Co-operation with -69- 



Other Projects 



director of the Mt„ Washington Observatory, who had been actively associ- 

 ated with Project Cirrus and the General Electric scientists even before 

 the project started. Howell's services were retained as a result. 



Howell's experiments have never been published, and opinions vary 

 about the results obtained. An interesting result was a group of lawsuits 

 totaling in the neighborhood of $2,000,000. The possibility of such suits 

 had been mentioned in the general discussions which preceded the actual 

 seeding, and at that time Langmuir had commented that it would be entirely 

 possible that such suits would be cheap compared with the results which 

 might be obtained. The city, he said, had already been committed to spend 

 $600,000,000 to add from 20 to 30% more water to its available supply, 

 and if they could get as little as 20% more water by seeding, it would be 

 worth the $600,000,000 and any interest on it. 



COMMERCIAL SEEDING IN THE WEST 



A tremendous amount of interest in the possibilities of controlling 

 precipitation was aroused in the West, especially in the great agricultural 

 regions where an adequate supply of water is highly important and a 

 drought can have catastrophic consequences. Many co-operative groups 

 of water users were formed, and organizations sprang up for the purpose 

 of engaging in cloud seeding on a commercial basis. At the time of writing 

 (May, 1952), some 350 million acres of the United States west of the Miss- 

 issippi were subject to cloud seeding by commercial operators, according 

 to current estimates (News release, James Stokley, for release May 12, 1952), 



Although many private individuals have undertaken to do their own 

 seeding, most of this. work has been done by a small number of commercial 

 organizations. Topping the list is the Water Resources Development Corp- 

 oration, with offices in Denver, Colorado, and Pasadena, California, whose 

 rainmaking contracts were reported to cover an area of over 300 million 

 acres, or about 12 times the area under irrigation in the United States. 

 "Farmers and ranchers paid millions of dollars for the services of this 

 organization, which contemplates extending its operations to Central Amer- 

 ica, South America, South Africa and Europe."* Others include the Pre- 

 cipitation Control Company, Phoenix, Arizona; North American Weather 

 Consultants, Pasadena, California; Olson & Taylor Corporation, Shelby, 

 Montana; and Wallace E. Howell Associates, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 



*Page 2, Senate report #1514 (5/12/52) on "Creating an Advisory Com- 

 mittee to Study and Evaluate Experiments in Weather Modification." 



