Rain Maker?

The first successful attempt in history to make rain artificially may be in the offing. From Capetown last week came word of a scheme by Chief Meteorologist Theodor Eberhardt Werner Schumann, South Africa's leading scientist, to convert Table Mountain's famed "cloth," a perpetually present blanket of very moist cloud, into water by means of electricity. Preliminary tests have convinced Dr. Schumann that dry Capetown can extract 31,000,000 gallons of water a day from this ever-present vapor.

Meteorologists are sure that under ordinary conditions it is impossible to duplicate the natural forces that make rain. But Table Mountain's "cloth" is not an ordinary cloud. Created by a wet south easter that constantly blows against the upper slopes of the mountain, the cloud, spilling over the mountainsides, is so moist that water drips from the trees and bushes it envelops, and rainfall high on the mountain averages up to 72 inches a year.

Dr. Schumann reasoned that there must be some way to condense this moisture on objects other than trees. He first tried gauze netting (using a small artificial cloud in his laboratory), but the tiny droplets went through his net. He decided to apply electricity: he put two gauze disks in a glass tube, created a potential of 30,000 volts between them, succeeded in condensing all the cloud vapor in his tube.

Dr. Schumann then felt he had the formula for Table Mountain. He proposes to erect on the mountaintop two parallel fences of fine wire netting, a foot apart, with an electric potential of 50,000 to 100,000 volts between them. He thinks that these wire screens, about 150 ft. high and 9,000 ft. long, will precipitate from the cloud at least 31,000,000 gallons daily. Since the cloud is constantly renewed, winter & summer, he believes it would give Capetown a year-round water supply.

Afrikaners are taking Schumann's scheme seriously. The tall, bearded potential rain maker studied and taught at Yale and other U.S. and German universities, last year got an award from the Royal Meteorological Society of London for his studies of fogs on airdromes. Last week Capetown's City Council was pondering putting up $1,000,000 for the rainmaking apparatus.

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