Rain

by Cynthia Barnett

  Hatfield had not only El Niño on his side, but trim good looks and a modesty that appealed to businessmen and civic leaders. “I cannot make it rain,” he would say. “I simply attract clouds, and they do the rest.” Thirty prominent Los Angeles businessmen signed on to give Hatfield $1,000 if he could draw eighteen inches by May. Hatfield erected a derrick twelve feet high in the San Gabriel Mountains above Pasadena. He set to work heating and mixing his chemicals and sending them aloft. He explained his technique of “subtle attraction” to a reporter for the Los Angeles Examiner:

  When it comes to my knowledge that there is a moisture-laden atmosphere hovering, say, over the Pacific, I immediately begin to attract the atmosphere with the assistance of my chemicals, basing my efforts on the scientific principle of cohesion. 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.

  After a dry Rose Bowl Parade on New Year’s as requested by the locals, the Los Angeles skies rained furiously that winter. The last inch specified in Hatfield’s contract fell a month before his deadline. The triumph created demand for Hatfield and his rain derricks throughout the West Coast, including Canada and Mexico. He was soon credited with filling the streams that kept local mines in operation in Grass Valley, California; replenishing the reservoirs of the Yuba City Water Company; and bringing much-needed rains to the parched badlands near Carlsbad Caverns.

  Hatfield discouraged crowds from congregating around his towers. But those who caught a glimpse were mesmerized. Fuming chemicals billowed and swirled in great plumes above the derricks, then disappeared into the air. Hatfield worked like a madman, clambering across the scaffolds, pouring his concoctions, and “keeping the mixture moving” as it evaporated.

  Critics pointed out that Hatfield’s contracts gave him almost unbeatable odds. He always worked during rainy season, and his contracts extended over a hundred-mile radius, “which increased his chances of apparent success a hundredfold,” writes the science and technology historian Jim Fleming. His most dogged detractors were the scientists at the U.S. Weather Bureau. Each time a newspaper lauded Hatfield, the bureau chief Willis Moore sent in scathing rebuttals from Washington, chasing Hatfield around the nation in print. In Hatfield’s home region in San Diego, the local weather bureau commissioner wanted him prosecuted for fraud.

  But the scientists again lost the battle for the public mind and heart. “As far as many townsfolk were concerned, this was an ordinary fellow, with no fancy degrees behind his name, whose woodshed brew delivered what lofty scientists and their delicate instruments could not,” writes the weather scribe Nick D’Alto. Country newspaper editors agitated for the government to buy Hatfield’s formula “and either prove it to be worthless or apply its merits.”

  Fittingly, a burst of storms would cinch Hatfield’s place in history. In San Diego, 1915 marked the fourth year of a devastating drought. With reservoirs only a third full, the city council agreed to a proposal from Hatfield: Over the following year, he would make enough rain to overflow Morena Reservoir. If Morena topped its banks by December 1916, the city would pay him $10,000. If not, he would be owed nothing.

  In January, Hatfield got to work. He’d been atop his derricks brewing his secret blend of chemicals just a few days when the skies began to drizzle. The drizzles turned to steady rains. The rains turned to record torrents; more than 28 inches fell that month. Morena Reservoir overflowed. On January 27 the Lower Otay Dam burst, sending a wall of water into downtown San Diego that killed dozens of people, destroyed many more homes, and washed out all but two of the city’s 112 bridges.

  The disaster became known as “Hatfield’s Flood.” Armed vigilantes were said to have gone after him and his brother, who fled on horseback. They returned the first week of February and held a press conference, Hatfield striking the demeanor “of the proverbial conquering hero, home from the fray and awaiting the laurel wreath,” wrote the San Diego Union. He announced he had fulfilled his contract to overflow Morena Reservoir, and now expected his $10,000. The shrewd city attorney argued the deluge was “an act of God.” Hatfield ultimately filed a lawsuit. The city lawyers said San Diego would pay only if he would sign a statement assuming responsibility for the flood and relieving the city of damages; some $3.5 million.

  The suit dragged on until 1938. Hatfield never received his fee. Surely the publicity was worth more. For the next fifteen years, Hatfield built his derricks around the West and on a few international assignments. In 1922, the New York Times ran a story about his trip to Italy to help break a drought: “He was anxious to explain his secret process to Pope Pius, and if the Pontiff agreed he would try to induce rain to fall on the Vatican gardens.”

  He made a trip to Honduras to save seven hundred acres of drought-stricken banana lands for the Standard Steamship and Fruit Company of New Orleans. In Medicine Hat, Alberta, the United Agricultural Association paid him $8,000 for nearly five inches of rain that fell in the summer of 1924. Hatfield built his tallest tower ever, lived in a “roomy cook car” next door, and conjured his chemical brew up to eight times a day. Sightseers flocked to see, and a moviemaker to film. When the spectacle was over, some observers pointed out that Medicine Hat’s long-term average rainfall in the three-month contract period was about six inches; Hatfield had cashed in on rains an inch below normal.

  Even the greatest rainmaker of all time could not survive the 1930s economic collapse and Dust Bowl. Hatfield’s fans urged President Franklin Roosevelt to bring him to the plains; six or eight of his derricks, they claimed, would bring an end to the disaster. But the era of celebrity rainmaking was over on all but stage and screen. Hatfield was the inspiration for Richard Nash’s play The Rainmaker, later made into a movie starring Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn.

  Hatfield was eighty-two when he died quietly at his home in Pearblossom, California, in January 1958. It was a rainy El Niño winter. No one picked up the news until four months later, when the city of San Diego tried to reach him—perhaps for a history project or a documentary. The headline in the Washington Post read: “Charles Hatfield, the Rainmaker, Dies in Obscurity.”

  The progressives in government were long embarrassed about their inability to counter rainmaking, which had been born with the aid of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. When the ag secretary Jeremiah Rusk stepped down in 1893 to become governor of Wisconsin, he proclaimed rainmaking would go down “among the curiosities of so-called scientific investigation, in company with its twin absurdity, the flying machine.”

  In the twentieth century, both absurdities would move from the realms of quackery to those of science and engineering.

  —

  While working one day at McCook Field just north of downtown Dayton, Ohio, in 1922, Orville Wright heard an unfamiliar airplane engine overhead. He walked to his window overlooking the thousand-foot airstrip banked by wooden hangars and engineering labs, established by the army four years before as America’s first base for experimental aeronautical research.

  It had been twenty years since the younger Wright, dashingly adorned with a waxed black mustache, soared into history in the world’s first lasting—all twelve seconds’ worth—powered flight along the beach at Kitty Hawk. He and his older brother, Wilbur, had gone on to log hundreds of flights, win a patent war for their Flying Machine, establish a school for pilots, manufacture airplanes, and sell the U.S. government its first.

  By this point, Wilbur had been dead ten years. Orville’s mustache was flecked with gray and pruned of its gravity-defying curls. The man no longer challenged gravity, either. Wright had piloted his last flight and sold his airplane company for a reported million and a half dollars so he could devote his time to inventing. Then generating more patents than any other city in America, Dayton had become the nation’s sanctuary for invention. Wright was its spiritual leader.

  Wright had been a key aeronautical adviser to the U.S. military through
out World War I, and still kept an office at McCook Field, “the bridge over which homespun flying machines stepped into the realm of truly engineered aircraft,” writes the air historian Peter J. Jakab. Air servicemen there perfected altimeters and airspeed indicators, earth-induction compasses and engine tachometers. McCook pilots finessed free-fall parachuting. They experimented with vertical flight. They completed the first nonstop coast-to-coast flight across America, in 1923.

  Academic and industry scientists who could gain permission from Air Service brass descended on McCook as well. Agricultural researchers bombed nearby farm acreage with insecticides dropped from a powerful new weapon against grasshoppers, the crop duster. Meteorologists, for the first time, could hoist their instruments directly into the clouds.

  It was this sort of nonmilitary experiment, on a summer day in 1922, that caught the ear of Orville Wright—and then drew his bewildered eyes.

  The sky that June day was dotted with dense, white cumulus clouds. Wright peered through his window just in time to watch a small plane, a French-built Le Père, disappear into one of them.

  About ten to fifteen seconds later, the plane emerged from the other side of the cloud, trailing what appeared to be smoke. On closer observation, Wright realized the long plume behind the plane was some sort of dust. The plane turned and dragged its dirt banner through the cloud again, and then again, for a total of five or six passes.

  “The cloud began to fade away,” Wright told a reporter, “and at the end of three or four minutes had practically disappeared.”

  The Le Père then nosed into another cloud, to the left of the first. After buzzing in and out of it several times, this cloud, too, began to fade. Then, the busy little plane tackled a third. “Within about ten minutes from the time I first saw the plane,” Wright marveled, “three clouds had entirely disappeared.”

  America’s aviation pioneer had witnessed man’s first successful effort to control the atmosphere. Now that modern humans could fly like the gods of mythology, could they also make it rain like Jupiter Pluvius?

  —

  The McCook Field cloud experiments took flight in an odd partnership between an entrepreneur named Luke Francis Warren and the Cornell University chemist Wilder Bancroft. Grandson of the well-known historian, diplomat, and U.S. navy secretary George Bancroft, the rotund scion once called himself “a specialist in unorthodox ideas.” Bancroft had a particular interest in colloid chemistry, which he defined as “the chemistry of bubbles, drops, grains, filaments and films.” He pondered the mechanics of raindrops—and their positive and negative charges—in his book Applied Colloid Chemistry. It is not clear how he met Warren, who claimed a diverse background of adventures from London to South Africa to the San Joaquin Valley of California, “where he had a bitter personal experience with drought.”

  Warren dreamed of earning his fortune with the first legitimate rainmaking company. Bancroft put up the scientific credibility and considerable capital. Their theory was that spraying clouds with electrified sand could coax down rain. Droplets of water suspended in clouds were charged either negatively or positively, but a film of condensed air around each prevented them from coming together to make the larger drops that form rain. Infused with sand of an opposite electrical charge, the droplets would coalesce and fall. The era of flight made it possible, Bancroft said. He wrote to Warren in 1920, “It would probably be absolutely prohibitive in cost to produce rain by spraying clouds from beneath; but it is quite possible that you can get satisfactory results by spraying from above.”

  Bancroft and Warren put considerable effort into lobbying the military for aircraft for their trials. Bancroft’s family connections must have been invaluable, and Warren wined and dined the contacts in Washington. It paid off. The U.S. Army Air Service provided planes, pilots, other staff assistance, and funding for initial field tests. The team contracted with the Harvard physicist E. Leon Chaffee to design equipment to charge sand particles and release them from the plane. The sand shot out the bottom from an electrified chute and scattered through the target cloud like a little dust storm.

  Like Wright, many who witnessed the trials came away with a sense of dramatic possibility even though they saw no rain. The head of McCook Field, Major Thurman H. Bane, told the Dayton Daily News a few months after the first tests that the military would soon be able to “push clouds out of the way when they are interfering with aeronautics,” and that “the Air Service will be able to make it rain whenever a deluge will be effective in combatting the enemy.” Commander Karl F. Smith of the U.S. Navy came to observe, and remarked that seeing a cloud sliced up was “absolutely uncanny.” The military applications were “so important,” he wrote, that after a few more trials, the U.S. Navy Bureau of Aeronautics should try to buy rights to the technology. Warren and Bancroft might have cashed in, but instead they formed the A.R. Company, for “Artificial Rain,” and applied for a U.S. patent for “Condensing, Coalescing, and Precipitating Atmospheric Moisture.”

  The U.S. Weather Bureau remained ever skeptical and deployed press releases just as it had battling Charles Hatfield earlier in the century. Dr. William Jackson Humphreys, the bureau’s meteorological physicist, placed Bancroft and Warren squarely with the nineteenth-century rain fakers: “The idea of the college professor and his aviator friends out in Cleveland, to sprinkle electrically charged sand on a cloud while above it in an airplane, is picturesque and plausible,” Humphreys wrote in a press release, “but won’t work in commercial quantities.”

  “The Bureau lumps the work of Dr. Bancroft and Mr. Warren with a series of valueless devices, pronouncing all rainmaking schemes to be ‘entirely futile,’ ” wrote the New York Times. When the newspaper asked Bancroft to respond, he telegraphed: “No use arguing with Weather Bureau. Prefer to wait for results and let them do the explaining.” But there was little to explain. The military remained interested for a few more years, and field trials moved to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds and then Bolling Air Force Base in Washington. While the electrified sand could “knock the stuffing out of clouds,” as Warren once put it, the project was essentially “attempting to do a big job with little money” and never managed to make rain or disperse fog, its other goal. With little to show after nearly ten years, more than twenty thousand dollars of his own money invested, and seven thousand more coaxed out of friends, Bancroft himself seemed to lose faith, too.

  Still, McCook deserves credit as site of the first successful attempt to control the atmosphere. It did not exactly get its historic due. The old airfield’s cramped proximity to downtown Dayton and too-short runway cut short its usefulness to the military, too. In 1927, McCook’s missions were relocated to Wright Field, about ten miles east of Orville’s old bicycle shop, now part of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Servicemen tore down the wooden buildings. They dismantled McCook’s 97-foot wind tunnel, which had been crafted with elegant cedar rings. They broke down the propeller test rigs. They hauled the portable dynamometer and other equipment to the new location.

  Today, McCook’s place in aviation history is largely forgotten by Dayton residents, who may know the name only as the city’s oldest strip mall, near the original field and now home to a bowling alley and peep-show theater. McCook Shopping Center is set back in a sea of old asphalt that is bowed and pocked by years of burying snow and brutal sun. Precipitation that falls on the pavement has nowhere to go, so it pools in large, oily depressions—perhaps the only rain ever harnessed at McCook.

  —

  In the 1940s, clouds of war ramped up the military’s interest in cloud physics. This included aircraft icing, gas mask filters, and screening smokes, which the Germans used in ’41 to hide the battleship Bismarck in the fjords of Norway. At the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, Irving Langmuir, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, and members of his research team, Vincent Schaefer and Bernard Vonnegut, had a smoke-research contract with the military to improve gas masks and hide large areas from air
raids. (Bernard’s brother, Kurt Vonnegut, worked at the Schenectady lab, too, interviewing scientists and writing press releases about their work.) The War Department asked the team to look into the dangerous loss of radio contact with planes flying through electrical disturbances in snowstorms, known as precipitation static. Langmuir and Schaefer decided to base their investigations at the stormy, cloud-shrouded Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire.

  As the GE scientists worked, they became fascinated with more basic cloud questions, such as why not all “supercooled” clouds—those containing liquid water droplets with temperatures below freezing—make snow. Serendipity helped figure it out. On a warm July day, Schaefer plunked some dry ice into a small freezer he was using as a cloud chamber to try to cool it down. Immediately, the cold cloud inside the chamber formed millions of tiny ice crystals. He removed the large chunk of dry ice and tossed in smaller and smaller ones, finding that even the tiniest grain would flood the chamber with ice crystals. It turns out that supercooled droplets need super-small bits, or nuclei, to cling to before they can make snowflakes—or raindrops.

  When Schaefer shared his discovery with his boss, Langmuir “was just ecstatic and he was very excited and said, ‘We’ve got to get into the atmosphere and see if we can do things with natural clouds.’ So I immediately began to plan to seed a natural cloud.”