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Man has always wanted to control the weather. How often has a cloud passed and rain been denied from falling?

The Chinese believed that dragons controlled the rain. American Indians conducted rain dances. Aztecs used to offer human sacrifices to the rain gods.

In a paper by James Rodger Fleming, professor of science and technology at Colby University and author of 'Fixing the Sky', he noted that from Plutarch to the generals of the American Civil War, people have been impressed by the great rains which fall after a large battle. Different theories surrounded these observed events, such as the smoke, the fire and/or the dust had an effect on the surrounding cloud formations. This in turn brought rain after these battles and it was seen to wash away the land which had been abused by man's fighting.

The science of rain enhancement has developed a long way from these observations, and its development is mostly due to the work of three men out of the General Electric lab of the 1950's. Vincent Schaefer, Irving Langmuir a materials scientist and Bernard Vonnegut an MIT chemist. Apart from being the brother of the writer Kurt Vonnegut (who also did the PR for GE), Bernard is most famously known for his discovery in 1946 that silver iodide forms ice crystals in clouds, a discovery that has become the basis of the cloud-seeding movement.

After several years, the Soviet and China embraced cloud seeding for military and other purposes. The US retreated to a position of not wanting to play with nature.

However, it was a discovery three years after the first cloud seeding trials in the US - that became the basis for ionisation as a viable method of rain enhancement. In 1949 Bernard Vonnegut began experimenting with the effects of weak electric forces on water droplets, coming to the conclusion that even a tiny electric charge increased the rate at which water coagulates into droplets.

This in turn led him to theorize that in electrifying particles in convective clouds, precipitation can be formed. Vonnegut went on to lead the investigation of such electrification both theoretically and experimentally for decades, eventually producing a basic prototype that was used by NASA to clear fog off its runways.

However, similar work was being attempted on the other side of the iron curtain. In the midst of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the scientist Valeri Uybo developed a particularly sophisticated rain enhancement device based on the principles observed by Vonnegut, the ATLANT system.

For fifteen years Uybo used his ionisation technology to clear fog, enhance rain, prevent hail and other precipitation influences. Unfortunately these developments were not documented to Western standards.

More recently, a team of scientists in Australia backed Uybo's techniques and have proven over three highly controlled scientific and independently reviewed experiments that ionisation can improve the rate of rainfall up to 9%.