Fixing the Sky (18 page)

In 1894 the
American Meteorological Journal
reported that entrepreneurial rainmakers had succeeded in convincing a number of people, and even some paying clients, that they could, for a price and with the proper chemicals, draw down moisture from the arid skies. The
Kansas City Star
reported that the rainmakers possessed good timing, for they often commenced their experiments just as rain was due, convincing the gullible onlookers that their success was no coincidence. It did not hurt that, according to climatological records, rainfall was near normal in the region in 1893 and 1894.
²⁰

In those years, the Rock Island Railroad Company maintained a popular rainmaking department and hauled a special car along the tracks with an agent who claimed not to be producing rain but to be assisting nature in the task by supplying certain missing (but unnamed) elements to the atmosphere through concussions, gaseous mixtures, and electrical discharges. By 1894 the railroad had developed ten such rainmaking outfits, frequently deploying three units at a time to operate in tandem. Clinton B. Jewell, the railroad's chief dispatcher, offered his rainmaking services free of charge. His mobile rainmaking car, inspired by Dyrenforth's experiments and outfitted at company expense with what Jewell claimed were the secret chemicals and apparatus of Melbourne, rode the rails as a kind of traveling fireworks and vaudeville show, detonating dynamite, launching exploding balloons and rockets, and dispensing foul-smelling volatile gases charged with electricity, the last said to chill the air to enhance condensation. He promised to deliver “Kansas Weather” to his clients across the Midwest.
²¹

Jewell gave reporters a tour of his car and a briefing on his procedures. He said his gas formula used “metallic sodium, ammonia, black oxide of manganese, caustic potash, and aluminum,” these mixed with an “alloy known as murium,” an imaginary radical thought to be an active agent in hydrochloric acid. These materials were both toxic and potentially explosive. When rain was to be produced, Jewell parked his car on a side track and filled an 800-gallon tank on the roof with water. Inside the car's laboratory was a wide shelf laden with bottles of chemicals and various sorts of apparatus. Under the shelf were large locked boxes, which were never opened in the presence of visitors. A second shelf supported a twenty-four-cell battery connected with wires to a very large jar. Another set of wires ran to the “rain machine proper,” which consisted of six large jars grouped by twos in which the gas was made and from which it was released from the car through three pipes. Other pipes, bottles, and vessels completed the scene, making the car look like a small chemistry laboratory. Jewell explained that no force
was necessary to send the warm, lighter-than-air, bluish gas into the sky: “When the rainmaking machine is in operation, 1,500 feet of gas escapes from each of the three pipes each hour. The warm gas ascends steadily over the span of four hours to an altitude of between 4 and 8,000 feet.” After several hours, the gas inexplicably “turns cold instantly and drops with a rush, creating a vacuum, into which the moisture contained in the air rushes, forming clouds, and they form the storm center.” Seeking a way to “make rainfall almost instantly,” Jewell said he was working on an apparatus to send his gases up in liquid form enclosed within a shell, which, when it burst, would release the liquid, spreading it in all directions, instantly forming a large volume of cold gas. Jewell and his colleagues gladly took credit for any rainfall, near or far, that coincided with their operations. In at least one case, however, a hailstorm came up in Belleville, Kansas, that broke windows and outraged the locals, who threatened to sue for damages. Nevertheless, Jewell claimed that his trials frequently produced between 0.5 inch and 6 inches of rain, “each time contrary to the predictions made by the weather service.”
²²

One widely publicized appearance of a rainmaker at a fair in Dodge City, Kansas, described a test of the liquid gas bombs:

Reportedly, the crowd was satisfied with the demonstration and fully expected to be drenched soon by a downpour. But nothing happened. The lasting result was equivalent to that of a good fireworks display—memorable but evanescent.

Harper
'
s Weekly
published a spoof of Kansas rainmaking in 1893 with its tale of “an unfortunate rain-maker,” the fictitious Mr. Schermerhorn Montgomery, of
Hankinside, Kansas. Sooner or later, it was inevitable that something would go wrong. Montgomery got into legal trouble by causing a flood when he claimed to have made rain: “It did not seem possible that a man could go about carrying, as it were, thunder storms in one pocket and long steady rains in another, and not fall into some sort of a complication with common folks who do not have even a heavy dew in the whole house.”
²⁴

Montgomery advertised that he made it rain only at night and on Sundays. He also claimed responsibility for cool northwesterly winds in the summer, but never charged for them. “I throw in a wind with each rain ordered,” he explained, “the same way you get a baked potato when you order a chop. Fogs, frosts, cloudy days, and aurora borealis extra. Earthquakes should be spoken for two days in advance of the time needed” (735).

One morning after a particularly heavy rain, Montgomery set out to collect $1 from every farmer in the county for his services, but he met with considerable opposition. The first farmer somehow “knew that warn't no artificial rain,” the second “reckoned it was a naterel thunder-storm,” and the third demanded proof that the shower was a Montgomery special. At a public meeting, Montgomery addressed the skeptical farmers:

Following this oration, a corn farmer rose and asked Montgomery if he was absolutely certain that it was his rain. “Every drop of it,” answered Montgomery. “Then,” replied the guileless farmer, “you are responsible for the ten acres of my corn which the storm washed away. I shall sue you for damages” (735). And he did, to the tune of $400.

Adding editorially that “the science of rain-making is in its infancy” (which it always seems to be),
Harper
'
s
noted that the business of artificial rainmaking (or, for that matter, hurricane diversion or climate engineering) would always be vulnerable to lawsuits that would be impossible to prevent and devastating to the enterprise: “A rain-maker, without his umbrella, standing in the middle of a vast Kansas prairie watching his rain pour down in torrents, and his patrons' crops ride gaily past on the hurrying flood and [with] no way to stop it, must be a most melancholy spectacle” (735). It seemed that Montgomery the rainmaker had not figured out a way to turn the rain off!

Charles Mallory Hatfield (ca. 1875–1958), who ran his proprietary operations mainly in the western states, garnered both widespread fame and quite some notoriety in the opening decades of the new century. Hatfield was born in Kansas and moved with his family to California as a youth, later working as a sewing machine salesman and eventually city manager of the Home Sewing Machine Company of Los Angeles. In 1898 he began to study meteorology;
Elementary Meteorology
, by William Morris Davis, was his favorite text, which he heavily annotated, and his favorite chapter, undoubtedly, was the one on the causes and distribution of rainfall.

Hatfield turned to rainmaking in 1902, trying his first experiments on his father's ranch in Bonsell, near San Diego. There he climbed a windmill and stirred and heated some chemicals in a metal pan, watching and waiting as the vapors rose into the sky. When a heavy rainstorm followed, it convinced him that his technique worked. He got into professional rainmaking on a bet, by claiming that he could produce 18 inches of rain in Los Angeles in the winter and spring of 1904/1905. Thirty prominent businessmen signed up to offer him $1,000 if he could accomplish this by May 1; the goal was exceeded a month early. Not that Hatfield had “done” anything. The long-term average rainfall in Los Angeles is 15 inches a year, more at higher elevations, and has ranged over the years from as little as 4 inches to more than 38 inches. Hatfield was lucky that year. The previous year's rainfall total had been a meager 8.7 inches; in 1904/1905, the year of his wager, it was 19.5 inches; and the following year, without Hatfield's involvement, it was 18.2 inches.

What Hatfield had “done” was erect a high tower near Esperanza Sanitarium in the San Gabriel Mountains above Pasadena and mix his noisome but ultimately harmless chemicals diligently throughout the winter. He believed that his technique worked best during the winter rainy season and at an altitude above 3,000 feet, two facts that he likely learned from Davis. When a reporter from the
Los Angeles Examiner
caught up with Hatfield in March, he described his theory as “a beautiful one”:

His primary apparatus consisted of galvanized evaporation pans containing chemicals and water to be absorbed by the atmosphere, “where the fluid begins to work to attract and accelerate moisture.” He also used a standard weather bureau rain gauge to document his results. His first tower was 14 feet square and 12 feet high, with a small opening underneath to create an updraft and thus assist the evaporation. Working with his brother Paul, Charles said he stayed up most of the night, with Paul coming on duty from four to eight o'clock in the morning. Then Charles would work again until six in the evening, sleep for three hours, and get ready for the next night. One of the brothers was constantly on watch. They had devised several alarms “for the detection of unannounced visitors during the night,” and they kept a “small arsenal” inside their tent. Charles told the reporter, “I can assure you anyone who is looking for trouble will find it. I devote some time to hunting in the mountains.” Hatfield said his technique was much more subtle and less noisy and flamboyant than those of his predecessors, but that he charged much more. He claimed that he never wanted to apply to Washington for a patent, “for that would mean the publication of information and rain-producers would spring up like mushrooms all over the country” (as they did after 1947). When asked about those who were skeptical of his methods, Hatfield quickly added, “Censure and ridicule are the first tributes paid to scientific enlightenment by prejudiced ignorance” (8).

Willis L. Moore, chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau, called Hatfield's method “fake rainmaking” and pointed out that widespread and “excessive” rains were prevalent throughout the West that winter:

By operating in the climatologically established rainy seasons (usually in midwinter in California), by consulting U.S. Weather Bureau forecasts, by taking contracts in drought-stricken regions on the chance that conditions would improve, and by claiming success for any nearby shower, Hatfield was able to operate at a substantial profit. Billing himself in newspaper ads as a “moisture accelerator,” he built his tall, mysterious towers, usually in the hills and often near a lake, and equipped them with large shallow pans in which he patiently
mixed and evaporated proprietary chemicals—until it rained. He used the “no rain, no pay technique,” with a clause in the contracts to cover his daily expenses in case of failure. Cynics said he was just betting his time against the expected fee that it would rain somewhere in the region during the contracted period. Hatfield's claims extended over an area that was about 100 miles in radius, which increased his chances of apparent success a hundredfold, compared, for example, with a circle merely 10 miles in radius. The careful reader will note that
any
rainmaking technique, traditional or technological, will be followed by rain in a large enough designated area if the practitioner is sufficiently persistent. It may take weeks or months, but it
will
rain—eventually, somewhere, and sooner if the technique is practiced during the rainy season. If you extend the spatial dimension to cover the globe, it is raining very hard somewhere on the Earth right
now
; and if you wait long enough, it will rain where you are. Hatfield also fielded requests to suppress the rain. The following appeal, published in the local newspapers, was addressed to him concerning the weather in Pasadena in January 1905 for the Tournament of Roses Parade: “Great moistener if you will listen now, And make this vow: Oh, please, kind sir, don't let it rain on Monday!”
²⁷