While in the navy during WWII, I was sent for officer training to Harvard and then to Tufts where I received a BS in general engineering, My career in atmospheric science began in 1947 when I was hired by the General Electric Co. in Schenectady, New York. By a marvelous stroke of serendipity, I started work with Project Cirrus, Dr. Irving Langmuirâ ™s group at the GE Research Laboratory. The year before, Vincent Schaefer had discovered dry-ice cloud seeding and a few months later Bernard Vonnegut discovered how silver iodide could be used to nucleate ice in supercooled clouds These were exciting days. We carried out numerous cloud seeding missions on supercooled stratus and cumulus clouds, measured ice and condensation nuclei, studied raindrop-size distributions, and developed instruments for this work.

I left Project Cirrus in 1949, a couple years before it ended, to pursue my MS in physics from Penn State, then started work as a marine meteorologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. I worked with Al Woodcock, an outstanding scientist at WHOI. Together we made several trips to Hawaii to explore the role of the sea-salt aerosol in the formation of rain from tradewind clouds. Both in the lab and the field we carried out many studies on how air bubbles bursting at the surface of the sea eject the droplets that form this aerosol. We measured raindrop-size distributions and investigated the water-to-air transfer of organic material and electrified droplets. A serendipitous happening got us excited about the role of erupting volcanoes in atmospheric electricity and the production of
an aerosol. While at Woods Hole, I took a leave of absence to get my PhD in atmospheric science at MIT.

In 1968 I started work at the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center (ASRC) at the University at Albany, New York, to work once again with Vincent Schaefer and Bernard Vonnegut. As at Woods Hole, I did some work on condensation nuclei and the marine sea-salt aerosol, but most of my effort was devoted to the mechanisms by which the drops from bubbles bursting at the surface of lakes, rivers, or the sea could have concentrations of bacteria several hundred times higher than that in the water where the bubbles burst. This effect could pose a public health hazard.

I retired in 1989 to devote my time to writing for the general public The Snowflake Man, my biography of Wilson Bentley (1865-1931), the Vermont farmer who took the world's first photographs of snow crystals, and who coined the expression that no two snowflakes are alike, was published in 1998. An earlier book, From Raindrops to Volcanoes, an account of my scientific adventures with several of my colleagues, was published in 1967. It was translated into six languages. In 1966 I was involved in a twenty-five minute educational film, Sea Surface Meteorology, prepared for the American Meteorological Society. I've published about 140 articles ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. Most appeared in the technical journals but around ten to fifteen were written in a "popular" style for a general audience. The latter cover a variety of topics in science, the history of science, and biographies of people who made the science come alive.

Return to List of Members