Seeds of Change

within a week. Humans in most other animals perish in three or four days. Entire civilizations have thrived because of water or ceased to exist without it. And since not every community lived near running water, they depended on rain. From Sudanian Savannah to the American planes, animals have followed the rains and humans migrated with them. Without life giving rain, plants would die and the animals that the humans depended on went elsewhere. In the American Southwest, summers are dry.

Native American people's like the Hopie, Mojave and Pueblo once performed rain dances every year. To this day, some still recreate these traditions. The clothing singing and intricate movements were hoped to please the gods in descending rain and rainmaking rituals have been practiced around the world. Rain has been considered sacred, as have the practices and people who helped control it. Unless sometimes those people were women. You see

for a while during the Little Ice Age. In some European cultures, women who attempted to alter nature were thought to be up to nefarious purposes. It was the devil's doing, their persecutors set women, being the weaker sex, were easily tempted by Satan, and any use of spells, potions, or dances to alter the weather would only end in disaster. If there was a hail storm, snowstorm, or torrential rains that threatened life, clearly which was at fault, and thousands

of women were killed for it. Historians have noted that over fifty thousand executions occurred in Europe alone. In an old German would cut a woman practicing witchcraft is clearly depicted her crime conjuring and enormous hail storm. Later European men took to the craft. Although the art was considered more scientific and a whole lot less satanic, they were looked upon as heroes and innovators, even when things didn't

turn out quite the way everyone hoped. It's been several hundred years since switches were first accused of meddling with the climate. Since then, we've often tried to improve upon nature in other ways that don't include elaborate dances or spells. But despite our advances in technology, when it comes to controlling the weather and our intentions for doing so, the forecast, it seems is cloudy. I'm Lauren Vogelbaum. Welcome to American Shadows.

In the late seventeen hundreds, American citizens mostly lived within fifty or so miles of the Atlantic Ocean, something President Thomas Jefferson wanted to end. If American settlers didn't expand out west, he feared that the English would. His vision was to spread people over the land far and wide, and within two years he convinced Congress to support an expedition toward the Pacific Ocean. To kick things off, he sent Captain Merryweather Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark on

their epic journey starting in eighteen o three. Part of their duties, aside from determining the economic preten shoal of the land they explored were scientific. Along the way, the men were to journal everything they encountered, from identifying plants and animals to notes on the geography. Climate was important too. Settlers would need to know how the weather might affect growing seasons. When Lewis and Clark first laid eyes on what they called the Great American Desert, they deemed it

unfit to live on. The land was parched as far as they could see. The local Native American people's didn't stay there year round. They only passed through following the Bison, the modern name of that area Nebraska. Prairie grass and other short grasses grew, of course, but nothing like back east, where grasses rose taller than a wagon wheel. Years later, when the rains did come to the dry plains, it softened the earth's baked soil. By the eighteen eighties, the

Great American Desert would disappear from the nation's maps. Though many avoided the area, it didn't stop settlers from head west. The Homestead Act of eighteen sixty two promised cheap land to those willing to colonize it, at just a dollar per acre. Men and women packed up everything they had and moved west. Farmers were soon raking in money from their corn fields. Ranchers raised large herds of cattle. Before long,

relatives back east headed out to join them. Life was good, but the rain didn't stay, and without it, vegetation became scarce. No rain meant dead crops and starving livestock. These new settlers may have learned how to work with the normal weather patterns, but they didn't know about a weather event called El Nino, and so, like generations of people the world over, they went for a different approach, the idea that two observed events were related, regardless of the logistics.

Simply put, for them, correlation was causation. While they didn't believe deities or which is were the cause of droughts, they did believe in remedy that didn't if you'll pardon the pun hold water. Early settlers had conquered the land, so now it was time to conquer the skies, and all they had to do, according to scholars, both ancient and modern, was shaped the rain loose from the clouds. One such scholar was the Greek philosopher Plutarch, who once

noted that soon after great battles, the rains came. He was uncertain whether some divine power sent the rains to wash the blood from the earth, or if the steaming blood itself caused condensed air. For a while, people believed him. Surely, Plutarch's writings explained the storms that hindered the Spanish Armada and caused the mudded waterloo that contributed to Napoleon's downfall. Oddly enough, Napoleon himself disagreed with Plutarch. Instead, he believed

it was ammunition that led to rainfall. In thirty one, the French fired thousands of shops into the sky, hoping to release rain from the clouds. Forferring to it as the percussion method, and French wineries claimed to have some success using it. Many people assumed that if it could work in the vineyards of France, it would work on the dry plains in the American Southwest. Droughout ridden farmers were willing to try anything. After all, what did they

have to lose. Even Lewis and Clark believed in the percussion method, history was chock full of battles taking place during the rain. Lewis once wrote he had even witnessed rain falling after heavy artillery blasts during the Civil War.

For Lewis, these concurrences simply added up to fact. In an article appearing in the American Journal of Science and Arts in eighteen sixty one, he stated, the discharge of heavy artillery at contiguous points produces such a concussion that the vapor collects and falls generally in unusual quantities the same day or the day following. There had been recent data to back the theory up to one. Edward Powers, an engineer in Chicago, had interviewed thousands of Civil War

soldiers from both sides. He had documented hundreds of battles that have been fought in the rain, proving that gunfire, either by concussion or percussion, brought on the precipitation that day or at least within two days. But battles weren't the only way to bring down rain, and Mother nature had built in protection, Powers claimed, and he stated so in his book titled War and the Weather. He wrote that burning large swaths of forest would also bring down

fire quenching rains. Fortunately, the U. S. Government didn't agree with his theory when he proposed that they burned down forests to induce rain. But while Powers Lewis, Clark, and others passed off correlation as scientific proof. Meteorologists themselves weren't buying it. The South was the wettest part of the country, and with or without battles, rain fell often. Powers was

an engineer. Lewis and Clark were explorers and soldiers. None of them understood science as it pertained to meteorology, but desperate times often lead people to believe in things that normally don't make sense, and if the scientists who studied weather couldn't make it rain, that turned people who promised they could enter. Charles Benjamin Farwell, a U S Senator with the Texas Ranch in eighteen ninety he pushed bill approving a nine thousand dollar budget on rainmaking efforts using

the concussion method. On the day of the experiment, no one checked with the meteorologists or bothered with the weather report. No newspaper reporters were there to witness the test, though they were quick to publish the results afterward. According to The Washington Post, after setting off an explosion, torrential rain

fell for nearly twenty minutes. The New York Post reported that the explosion caused rain to fall for six hours over a thousand square miles about twenty hundred square kilometers. Farwell had been the only one overseeing the project, and on his word alone, the experiment was passed off as credible scientific fact. The following year, Congress, once again ignoring scientists, approved an additional ten thousand dollars for more experiments involving

the concussion method. Governments im parched places like Nebraska and Kansas attempted to blast rain from the skies using tons of dynamite. Though the experiments didn't produce much in the way of rain, officials reported great success to the newspapers. Between notable historic figures, politicians, and the press, the stage had been set for Charlatan's to take advantage of the public, and one in particular had been paying very close attention. His wiry five foot nine frame didn't do much to

command anyone's attention. His hair could be as unruly as the weather, and he frequently swept a curl from his forehead. His voice was soft enough that others often assumed he was shy or awkward, or both. Other times, though, when someone got him talking about the weather, his excitement caused his striking blue eyes to light up and his words to flow with hurried confidence, spewing technical jargon and data

that few could keep up with. That didn't stop them from hanging on his every word, though, from farmers to politicians, people loved him, and his fan base stretched across four continents. But he wasn't a movie star, and it wasn't his looks that drew people. Though the smile he presented so often was infectious. If asked, people would say Charlie Hatfield's greatest assets were his enthusiasm and charisma. Magazines and newspapers

wrote extensive articles about him. His quiet confidence and exploits were the subject of political and scientific debate. He wasn't the only one in his feet, but he was certainly the best. After all, he had been practicing his art since he was a boy on his parents ranch. You see, Hatfield was a rainmaker, and either he truly knew how to make it rain, or he knew how to convince

people that he did. He had what others in his profession did not, because on top of all that charisma and self assuredness, Hatfield was also quite knowledgeable when it came to the weather. It had started out as a side hustle he had made a reputation among the local southern Californian ranchers for bringing in much needed rainfall, But it wasn't until nineteen o four, at the age of forty, that he was able to leave behind his job as a sewing machine salesman to make a small fortune as

a rainmaker. And all of it started with a bet. That year, the city of Los Angeles was suffering through an extreme drought that had begun years earlier. Hatfield travel to the city with an offer he would make it rain, just like he had for the ranchers farther south. Hatfield was clear that he didn't have luck on his side.

He had knowledge. He understood a lot about the climate, including something known today as the el ne Neo Southern oscillation or end SO, a complex system of weather patterns rotating between warm and cool ocean currents the causes a shift in the atmosphere. This process, along with strong trade winds, impacts weather on a global scale, and when Hatfield made the bet with city leaders, he had warm weather l NENO on his side, along with a mountain of Weather

Bureau reports. The regular rainfall rarely exceeds eight or ten inches. He told city officials. I cannot make it rain. I simply attract clouds and they do the rest. There must be some moisture in the air for me to work with. Had city officials understood and so that have known that the average rainfall was fifteen inches in an al neno year. Instead, all they knew was the city had experienced a severe drought and they needed to do something. They put their

trust in Hatfield because he didn't offer them potions and promises. No, he offered them what other Charlatan's had not, scientific data and a special blend of twenty three chemicals he claimed could literally milk the clouds of rain. Being a salesperson, Hatfield also understood marketing and making a happy customer. He was more than willing to back up his claims, so he made the city a bet they couldn't turn down. Give him five months to produce eighteen inches of rainfall.

If he could uphold his end of the deal, they'd pay him a thousand dollars And if you're wondering, that's somewhere around twenty thousand today. Not a bad paycheck. When it was over, the results spoke for themselves. Hatfield had exceeded all their expectations, and the city happily paid up instantly. Charlie the Rainmaker became front page news. By nineteen fift Hatfield had seventeen contracts under his belt, from Texas to

Alaska and places in between. His photo appeared in papers and magazines as far away as Cape Town, South Africa. In London, England, they had nicknames for him to the Cloud Compeller, God of Plenty, First Lieutenant to Jupiter, and Professor Hatfield. While other rainmakers had long given up the trade and their sneak oils, Hatfield was thriving. As demand for his services increased, so too did his fees, upwards of four thousand dollars for four inches of rain and

sub instances. And the thing is it rained every time. Well, maybe not exactly on a particular day, but Hatfield kept his word and met his deadlines, often exceeding them, and to some it seemed Hatfield could sweet Mother Nature into

whatever he wanted. When the city of San Diego suffered a significant drought in nineteen fift Hatfield happened to be in town, so he offered his services, and, like the other jobs had been hired to do in the past, the city felt they had nothing to lose, after all, they would only pay if it rained, and the city officials were desperate. The Marino Reservoir was barely at one third capacity, and the demand on the water supply was

growing with the ever increasing population. When Hatfield gave them his enthusiastic dattle laden pitch, every city leader was on board, well all but one. That is. One official named Herbert Faye called the whole thing foolish. He was outvoted, though, and Hatfield got the job. The new year had barely been rung in when Hatfield set to work. In January of nineteen sixteen, he built a twenty foot tower sixty

miles deep in the woods. He had finished, he climbed the tower and poured his special chemical brew into iron pans and set the concoction on fire. Those curious enough to follow Hatfield reported that the smell was bad, like the fumes from a Limburger cheese factory had been let loose. Hatfield climbed the tower and repeated the process every few hours, and the rain had promised showed up within days, making good on his word to bring in enough rain to

fill the morain in reservoir. True to his reputation, Charles Hatfield had exceeded their expectations. The trouble was San Diego had no idea just how devastating that would be. The rains came lightly at first, then increased steadily over the next two weeks. Elated people cheered. Newspapers posted the in news rainmaker hat Field induces clouds to open by January, though, rains of biblical proportions deluged the city in the mountains. On the outskirts of San Diego, sees of rain pummeled

the landscape, causing landslides. The downpour quickly overwhelmed the San Diego River too. The resulting floods swept away everything in their path, telephone lines, roads, homes, the entire community of Little Landers. Now the rains weren't just hitting San Diego. The entire coastline experienced similar rainfall and flooding. While some speculated that Hatfield couldn't have affected the weather that far

up the coast, others offered a different take. One man who had to be rescued by rowboat told first responders, let's pay Hatfield ten thousand dollars to quit. The comment didn't phasee hat Field though the San Diego Union printed his response a day later. In the next few days, I expect to make it really rain. Clearly Hatfield had to be joking. San Diego no longer needed rain. In fact,

it was imperative that it stopped. Yet when officials pressed, his blue eyes shone with that trademark enthusiasm never more serious in my life. He said, just hold your horses and I'll show you a real rain. And rain it did. I suppose Hatfield was lucky not to be born a German woman in the fourteen hundreds. If he had, the following events would surely have gotten him hanged for witchcraft. The rainfall, already at record levels, kept increasing. Valley windmills

resembled water wheels. Gas supplies couldn't be delivered. The Santa Fe train station ground to a halt, and telephone lines were swept away, cutting off communications. If all that wasn't bad enough, there was about to be more bad news. The Lower O Tai dam soon gave way. One worker who had watched it break open raced to warn the local ranchers nearby. Before he could, though, a wall of

water forty ft tall crashed into the valley. He scrambled to climb a tree, but the rushing water swept him from one tree to another before the trees also broke loose. After dumping over thirty inches of rain, the storm finally ended. That January became the wettest month on record, and the damage was catastrophic, with the death poll of fifty human lives. Martial law prevailed in the valleys, and the U. S. Marines were brought in with orders to shoot looters on site.

Naval ships were required to ferry people and supplies back and forth from the city. Thankfully, the Merino Reservoir held, but barely. Soon enough, residents began calling the disaster Hatfield's flood. Despite the destruction, though, Charlie seemed pleased, and now that the reins had ended, he set out on foot for a sixty mile hike to collect his pay. After all, he had upheld his end of the bargain, and now it was time for the city to do the same.

As he might imagine, he ran into a problem with that the city officials had hired him. That much was true, that had an agreement, but only a verbal one, and although Hatfield had made good on his word, the city now faced lawsuits, lots of them. The plaintiffs argued that Hatfield had acted on the city's behalf and that he had caused the disaster, not in mother nature. If the city paid Hatfield for his services, they claimed, they would

be taking responsibility for all those losses. When Hatfield objected, the city officials pointed out the contract had never been signed, making it void. They also wanted Hatfield to prove the rains weren't an act of God and that he alone had caused the rain. They did, however, offered to pay the ten thousand dollars if Hatfield accepted responsibility for the damage. I'm sure it's no surprise that Charles refused their offer. Angry and upset, he sued the City of San Diego.

It would take twenty two years, but the case would eventually find its way into court, where it was quickly dismissed. Charles Hatfield was never paid a single dime for his efforts there, and you'd think after those catastrophic results, other cities would refuse to hire him. But hire him they did. From nineteen sixteen through the nineteen thirties, Hatfield found plenty of employment both locally and internationally, and The press continued

to report on his successes. Cuba and Honduras contracted him to douse forest fires that were threatening valuable banana crops. The New York Times wrote a out his trip to Italy, where it was said Hatfield explained his secrets to the Pope so that the pontiff could induce rain over Vatican gardens. Alberta, Canada, contracted him for five inches of rainfall. Hatfield built a tower bigger and taller than had ever done before, drawing not only hordes of spectators but a movie crew to

document the event. He put on a show, too, often climbing the tower eight times a day to cook his chemical concoction. Eventually, the rains came five inches of rainfall, to be exact. Delighted, Alberta paid Hatfield handsomely for his help. Afterwards, scientists and other observers pointed out that Alberta typically received six inches of rainfall yearly on average, not five. Alberta had just paid Hatfield the biggest check of his career, all for an inch less of rain than normal. The

era of the rainmaker couldn't last forever, though. Civil engineers designed dams and that meant better water management during the nineteen thirties dustable era. Hatfield fans were unsuccessful in persuading President Franklin Roosevelt to send the rainmaker to the hard hit planes. Even when the city of San Diego suffered another dry spell, they quickly refused Hatfield services, although they

did briefly consider hiring a different rainmaker. With his best days as rainmaker behind him, Charles Hatfield slipped from the public eye. Without contracts, he was forced to return to his previous line of work as a sewing machine salesperson. Not long after that, his wife divorced him. No one heard from Charles Hatfield for years until nineteen fifty six, when Hollywood made a film based loosely on his life. It starred Burt Lancaster in the leading role alongside Katherine Hepburn.

It was nominated for three Golden Globes. Two years after the film's release, the city of San Diego tried to contact Hatfield for a documentary on the flood that had hit the city years before, but Hatfield didn't answer. He couldn't easy. Four months earlier, in January of night he had quietly died alone and his home in pair Blossom California, at the age of eighty two that May. After learning about his death, journalists put him in the papers once more.

The headline for the Washington Post read Charles Hatfield, the Rainmaker dies in obscurity. No reporters or die hard fans were present on the day Charles Hatfield was laid to rest at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale. In fact, in an ironic twist of fate, the man who had made a career out of filling the sky with everything a city needed to beat the heat failed to take advantage of its final audience. There wasn't the cloud in the sky. There's more to this story. Stick around after

this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. Curious Orville Wright walked to the window of his office and McCook field, the airfield operated by the United States Army Air Service, was home to aviation experimentation. He knew the sound of every plane except the one he had just heard, so he glanced out the window, which gave him a clear sightline of the thousand foot runway, the hangars, and all the engineering labs. He had seen a lot of

planes over the years, each designed for different purposes. Many of those projects had begun right on this particular airstrip too. Agricultural researchers had come up with the aid to drop insecticide directly onto crops from low flying planes, and thanks to aviation, meteorologists could now take their instruments up into

the clouds. And it was this sort of plane that caught his attention that warm summer day in two His brother Wilbur had been gone nearly ten years, but if he had been there that day, he would certainly have been as amazed as Orville. Older. Now with his signature mustache graying and trimmed of its gravity defying curls, Orville stared out the window at the wonder in the sky. The plane, a French built loop hare, disappeared into one of the many clouds dotting the sky. When it re emerged,

a long tail of smoke trailed behind it. No, he thought, not smoke. The plume was some sort of dust. The plane circled and disappeared into the cloud once more. All told, he watched it make six passes through the cloud before banking and vanishing into another dense cloud to the left of the first, and with each passed through the clouds began to fade. By the time the little plane had moved on to the third and fourth, the first cloud

had vanished. Orville Wright, the man who had made aviation history with his brother at Kitty Hawk, had just witnessed America's first attempt to control the weather by plane. The men behind the experiment where businessman Luke Francis Warren and a Cornell University chemist named Wilder Bancroft. Warren and Wright had a lot in common. Both were entrepreneurs, and both

were fascinated with inventing. Right long since sold his airplane business for the tidy sum of one and a half million dollars and had dedicated his life to inventing things rather than running a business. Warren wasn't as wealthy as Right, but money was certainly on his mind. You see, Warren aspired to cash in on heading up the first company

to manufacture rain. His scientists knew a thin films surrounded negatively and positively charged droplets of water inside clouds, a one that prevented the tiny droplets from collecting into larger ones, which formed rain. But they had a theory that if they dusted the clouds with electrified sand they could induce rain, and airplanes made the whole thing possible. Bancroft and Warren convinced the U. S. Army Air Service to provide not

just funding, but essential pilots and planes too. The pilots would fly into cumulus clouds and eject the sand through a special shoot. Although the trials didn't produce a single drop of rain, one Navy commander marveled at the disappearing clouds and wondered if the U. S. Navy Bureau should buy the technology from Warren and Bancroft. But after ten years of fruitless trials, everyone associated with the project lost and it's funding stopped. That didn't mean people stopped trying, though.

Wartime in the nineteen forties ramped up a different need for controlling the weather. The Allies faced danger from electrical storms that could knock out radio communications, as well as blizzards, hail, and torrential rains. Soon the War Department set up shop at the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire. A scientist working on a hot July day stashed dry ice in a cloud chamber and then watched as crystals formed. Millions of them. After experimenting, he learned that even the tiniest

speck of dust would cause the same results. All the droplets really needed, it seems, renuclei to cling to the result, depending on the temperature, was either snowflakes or rain drops. The Times loved the news, reporting that a piece of dry ice the size of a pea would be able to make millions of tons of snow. To test it, the War depart Mint sent a plane into a cloud over Mount graylock A November ninety six. Once inside the cloud,

the plane unloaded six pounds of ice pellets. Within seconds, the cloud erupted with ice crystals, and snow fell from the skies over three mile path. Requests, mostly well intentioned, flooded the scientists. A search and rescue teams thought clearing away clouds could aid them in their work. The Kansas State Chamber of Commerce wanted to use the technology to end droughts, and Hollywood wanted it on the technology to believing they could use it to create weather on a

film set. There was another use, though, the military. Manipulating the weather could become a weapon as powerful as any atomic bomb, just without the radioactive aftermath. Dumping snow on airstrips or causing mud slides near a target would certainly hinder the enemy. Even today, the U. S. Air Force still keeps tabs on emerging technologies and we're guards to using the weather to wage war, and naturally its uses

spread to the civilian side of life. As recently as two thousand and eight, Beijing wanted to manipulate the weather to provide the best possible conditions for the Olympics, and in Florida, one company created a powder that turns into a gel and bragged that their product had the ability to weaken a hurricane. But the most prominent use of weather altering technology before the U N prohibited it, that is, would have to be during the Vietnam War. Between nineteen

sixty seven and ninety two. The Air Weather Service used the technology to seed clouds in an effort to reduce traffic along the Ho Chi Min Trail. The project was a secret to most Americans, and many who did know about it questioned it for being so unusual, but supporters were quick to point out how much more humane a bit of rainfall was compared with deadly chemicals like napalm MHMM, all of which was summed up nicely in the unofficial motto that people in the program were known to proclaim,

make mud that'd say not War. American Shadows is hosted by Lauren Vogelbaum. This episode was written by Michelle Muto with researcher Robin Miniter, and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Trevor Young, with executive producers Aaron Minky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. To learn more about the show, visit Grim and Mild dot com. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.