MAKING rain sounds outlandish, and maybe it is. But audacious ideas are nothing new to Stephen Salter. If the wave-power pioneer thinks he can solve the world’s worsening water shortage by turning wind turbines into rain-making machines, there are plenty of people who’ll listen to him.
Salter, an engineer at the University of Edinburgh, became famous in the 1970s for inventing the “nodding duck” wave-power device, which spawned many of the wave-power designs now under development and in trials. He’s even tried his hand at designing a whirling remote-controlled machine to detonate landmines. At an international marine conference in Crete…
