"Always Alplaus"

The Seeds of an Idea: Three Men of Alplaus

by Bob Winchester 4/2/2026

One of the discoveries that I made after moving to Alplaus was how diverse in occupations and interests the residents were, and that still holds true today. Talking with people of widely varying backgrounds always provides a different perspective or a chance to learn something new.

The following story is about three men who each took a singular concept and produced three very different but very distinguished results. All three lived in our hamlet as contemporaries, within a quarter-mile radius of each other, and influenced not only the lives of our village but also the entire world.

When most people think about water, they think of three forms that water naturally takes: the liquid they drink, the ice that they might put in a drink, and the steam that rises when water is heated. What most of us overlook is how adding a simple crystalline substance can produce something that is neither completely solid, liquid, nor steam — a substance like Jell-O!

Bernard Vonnegut (1914–1997), who lived on Alplaus Ave., worked at the GE Research Laboratory. Bernie studied ways to make clouds give up their water content upon command so that arid areas could be watered and farmers’ fields could receive the moisture they needed to make crops grow. He had an idea that if he could introduce the right “seed crystals” into the water vapor inherent in clouds, the water would condense into droplets and produce either rain or snow.

Bernie and a group of colleagues/friends decided to test that theory in his house. On a day with clouds drifting overhead, they built a very hot fire in the fireplace. When a cloud was due to be directly over the house, they sent silver nitrate into the fire, hoping that it would rise up into the cloud and seed the cloud, causing rain to begin to fall on the village. It was an inefficient way to deliver the seeds to the clouds, but it did provide an impetus for later experiments.

This was, if not the first, certainly among the very first attempts at cloud seeding. Bernie would sometimes take walks along the avenue late at night, after his kids had gone to bed, when the air had a high moisture content. He would wave a handmade newspaper torch that had been soaked in silver nitrate and then dried, in order to see if he could seed the moisture in the air to produce fog.

These experiments did produce results, but the delivery method of seeding wasn’t productive. Bernie persuaded Kiah Maynard, who lived on Hill St. and had been a World War II bomber pilot, to fly him across the Mohawk Valley in a plane on a winter day so that he could seed clouds with crystals of dry ice. The results caused such a significant snowstorm that barn roofs in the area collapsed. Partially as a result of the success of this experiment, GE decided that it should get out of the business of seeding clouds. The Atmospheric Science Center was founded and took over the experimentation in that field of science.

A few doors up Alplaus Ave. lived another scientist, Francis “Falling Chimneys” Bundy (1910–2008), a physicist at the GE Research Lab. (The story of his famous nickname will have to wait for another time but was important to his selection of his career.) Francis was fascinated by many elements of physics, but he and a group of his colleagues were particularly intrigued by the manner in which pieces of carbon (coal) could be transformed over time into diamonds. These scientists speculated that if you had the right seed and could put carbon under high enough pressure at high temperature, you could transform the carbon into diamond material.

And in fact, after experimenting with many different combinations of seeds, temperatures, and pressures, his group succeeded in making the first manmade diamonds, which were used in industrial applications.

Bernie Vonnegut’s younger brother, Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007), lived on Hill St. at the time with his family. Kurt worked at GE in the publicity department and longed to be a writer. During the day, he would write advertising copy for GE, a job that he hated; at night, he would write short stories and eventually novels based on his life experiences. One of the ideas he picked up on was how the right seed could change the properties of a substance so that it would change from a liquid to a solid at very different conditions than it would have if the seed had not been introduced.

Kurt speculated about how much fun it would be to stand in front of a large group at a party on a hot summer day and drop the right seed crystal into a bucket of water so it would freeze instantly. After amazing everyone, what might you do with that bucket of ice? You would most likely take it out and set it on the back porch, which in his case, overlooked the Alplaus Creek. At some point someone would toss the bucket’s contents into the creek. Because of the seed that caused the ice to form in the bucket, that crystal structure would cause the Alplaus Creek to freeze, which would in turn cause the Mohawk River to freeze, and then the Hudson River, and then the Atlantic Ocean, and so on. This idea led to Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle, which features a substance known as “ice-nine.”

So, three men of Alplaus took one idea, the idea of a seed crystal, and used it to develop the concept of cloud seeding, making diamonds, and writing a classic novel. There of course is much more to these men's stories, but what links them all is living in Alplaus, where they learned from each other — still a fundamental part of living in our hamlet!