Page 107 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

Charles Hatfield, the “moisture accelerator”

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 Kan-
sas 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 ulti-
mately 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”:

When it comes to my knowledge that there is a moisture-laden atmosphere hover-
ing, say, over the Pacific, I immediately begin to attract that atmosphere with the
assistance of my chemicals, basing my efforts on the scientific principle of cohe-
sion. I do not fight Nature as Dyrenforth, Jewell and several others have done
by means of dynamite bombs and other explosives. I woo her by means of this
subtle attraction. 25

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