C759 CC697 Walt Roberts (Wait R.,759) 1/ 2/88 i :33 PM L:57 KEYS : /PROVOCATIONS NO. 190/

Memo to: The Climate Club — C759 2 January 1988 From: Walt Roberts Provocati on N o .190 His Laboratory Was A Sensational Mess

Tonight I am sitting at my computer desk looking at two tour inch squares of half-inch-thick plastic. One has a beautiful, delicate tree like pattern in its interior; the other a feathery star like design. These are old treasures of mine. I watched the patterns made in a laboratory run by and Bernard back around i960 or earlier. I can't even remember where I saw it done, though I think it was in Boston. I spent many hours with these two giants of experimental atmospheric science back in the 1950s and 60s, and these times were among the most rewarding in my memory. Vonnegut is also the only person I ever knew who had a refrigerator in his basement with a keg of beer on tap.

Vince Schaefer and Bernard Vonnegut were pioneers in experimentation at in Schenectady, New York, when was the imaginative director of research there. Vince discovered cloud seeding with dry ice, and Bernard found out that vaporized silver iodide crystals were a potent and easy-to-generate cloud seeding agent. Both were supremely skilled at observing the processes of nature, and especially of cloud formation and atmospheric electricity, as they are today in retirement. Both made big contributions to science.

The designs in my pieces of plastic were generated in an incredib1y cluttered laboratory. There, amidst apparatus that would make a magnificent caricature of a scientific lab, they discharged a high voltage spark into a plastic square that had been stored in a deep freeze. The one with the “tree" got its discharge at the edge; the other in its center. They make beautiful coasters. But they were done to illustrate discharge patterns in an insulating material, as a suggestive analog for atmospheric processes.

I was extremely happy when, recently, a colleague of mine gave me a reprint of a marvelous talk by Duncan Blanchard about "Bernard Vonnegut, the Gentle Iconoclast." Blanchard, a student of them both at State University of New York at Albany, later had a distinguished career in their same field. He gave the speech at Bernard's retirement, if it can be called that. Bernard's still at it full speed.

Blanchard quotes Bernard's brother, the writer , describing Bernard's lab. "His 1aboratory was a sensational mess,...where a clumsy stranger could die in a thousand different ways, depending on where he stumbled. The company [General Electric] had a safety officer who nearly swooned when he saw this jungle of deadfalls and snares and hair-trigger booby traps. He bawled out my brother. My brother said to him, tapping his own forehead with his fingertips, 'If you think this 1 aboratory is bad, you should see what it's like in here.'" From this jumble came the products of true genius, In 1985 Bernard had published 150 scientific papers, and had generated 26 patents. The quality was high. The productivity continues. It any of you would like it, I can mail along a photocopy of Blanchard's engrossing 12 page talk

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