Page 109 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

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, com-
pared, 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 suffi-
ciently 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
Hatfield plied his trade along the West Coast and into Canada and Mexico.
In the summer of 1906, following a drought in the Canadian Yukon and after
his initial success in Los Angeles, the provincial governors became an “easy
mark” for Hatfield’s self-promoting efforts. They awarded him a $5,000 contract
for “meteorological experiments on the Dome,” the mountain peak near Daw-
son. The largest mining concerns raised an additional $5,000 by private subscrip-
tion. According to the contract, should Hatfield fail to produce sufficient rain to
satisfy a board of seven evaluators, he was to receive only his cost of transporta-
tion and shipping to and from the Klondike and maintenance for himself and
an assistant. 28
These arrangements generated concerns in the Canadian Parliament a con-
tinent away in ottawa. The Honorable George E. Foster, of North Toronto,
was the most vocal: “Suppose that man Hatfield gets his apparatus to work
and tinkers with the vast and delicate atmosphere of the universe; is it not pos-
sible that he may pull out a plug or slip a cog, and this machinery of the uni-
verse once started agoing wrong may go on to the complete submersion of
this continent?” And what if damage is done across international borders?
29
If this government starts Mr. Hatfield shooting up into the sky, discharging his
wondrous and mysterious combination of chemicals into the atmosphere and
interferes with the vast chain of atmospherical mechanism to which the United

92 | rain fakerS