A century ago, in 1915, as today, San Diego thirsted for water. Dangerously low reservoir levels threatened the region’s potential to grow. Promoters of the city’s Panama-California Exposition, entering its second year, worried about the drought’s impact on fair attendance. A civic organization, the San Diego Wide Awake Improvement Club, demanded action.
Onto the arid stage—and into San Diego’s city council chamber on December 13, 1915—stepped a potential savior. A dapper, 40-year-old sewing machine salesman named Charles Mallory Hatfield vowed to make it rain. As Barbara Tuthill details in “Hatfield the Rainmaker,” the self-professed “moisture accelerator” told the councilors that he could have the Morena Reservoir—only one-third full at the time—overflowing within a year for a fee of $10,000, to be paid only if he succeeded.
Hatfield’s path to San Diego started more than a decade earlier in nearby Bonsall. There, on his father’s ranch, Hatfield conducted his first rainmaking experiments from the top of a windmill tower.
By 1904, he was able to convince some of California’s water-starved ranchers and farmers that he could milk the skies by releasing a secret 23-chemical cocktail into the air from tall wooden towers perched on stilts. “I do not make rain,” Hatfield said. “That would be an absurd claim. I simply attract clouds, and they do the rest.”
In December of 1904, he guaranteed Los Angeles business leaders that he could coax 18 inches of rain to fall over the ensuing five months in return for $1,000. When the target was eclipsed, the rainmaker became a star. “Hatfield immediately became the darling of excitement-hungry newspapers and popular magazines,” wrote scholar Clark C. Spence.
Although a salesman by trade, Hatfield was no smooth-talking huckster. Born into a devout Quaker family, he had a polite, homespun manner. His piercing eyes were as blue as water, and his eerily pale skin suggested that he had little affinity for the sun.
Hatfield’s Predecessors
As scholar James Rodger Fleming pointed out, Hatfield followed in the soggy footsteps of a line of scientists and pseudo-scientists who claimed they could make the skies weep. The founding father of American rainmaking was perhaps James Pollard Espy, “the leading meteorologist of his day” according to Fleming. In his 1841 book The Philosophy of Storms, Espy claimed that by moving humid air currents upward into the cooler layers of the atmosphere, condensation would occur and rain could be artificially induced. After being hired as the country’s first federally funded meteorologist the following year, Espy tested his thermal theory of storms by intentionally setting forest fires to create massive updrafts, but the experiments fizzled along with his thesis.