Transcript
Do Rainmakers Believe They Make The Rain?
In 1915, San Diego is on the brink of becoming a major American city, if it doesn’t die of thirst first. Enter Charles Hatfield. He claims a secret chemical process can summon rain, end the drought, and sustain the city as it prepares to welcome the world for a critical international exhibition. And he’s right. It rains. The problem is, it doesn’t stop. Floods tear through the region. Dozens are dead. Millions of dollars in damage follow. Entire neighborhoods are washed away. In the aftermath, everything hinges on one impossible question: did he truly believe he was making the rain or was it all a con?
This transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors. Edited transcripts replace generated versions when they are available.
00:00This is World's Greatest Con. I'm Brian Brushwood.
00:05Hey, let's make a bet.
00:09How much you want to bet that I can make it rain?
00:14Here are the terms.
00:16In the next week, in the next seven days, there will be one inch of precipitation in your zip code.
00:24I mean your zip code, as in the zip code that you live in.
00:28Go ahead, look at the weather app if you want to.
00:31Take a moment, sit with it.
00:33It's a real bet.
00:34I, Brian Brushwood, am betting you, the listener, that in the next seven days, it's going to rain.
00:40Now here's the thing, though.
00:42If you agree to this bet, I do expect you to pay me $50.
00:47My Venmo is at brian-brushwood.
00:50My PayPal is brian-schwood. com.
00:53There is no C in schwood. But... I'm me.
00:58And the show isn't called World's Fairest Bets.
01:02So as you're making your decision, you're probably wondering what the angle is.
01:09And yes, there is one.
01:11Actually, there are two.
01:13Angle number one, we do have some data.
01:16Specifically, when people tend to listen and from where.
01:19Most of you guys listen in the first 90 days, which coincides with winter and early spring, based on our release schedule.
01:26Just so happens that if we really ramp up production on the podcast through the first quarter of the year, we would statistically see it rain in more places in the American Northeast and Midwest, which is where most of you guys live.
01:39Average it out on a large enough scale, we'd probably come out ahead. All right. Are you in? $50.
01:48Oh, yes, there is the second angle.
01:53If it doesn't rain, I will not be paying you.
01:58I gave you my Venmo.
02:00But even if I could hear you yelling yours back to me, it wouldn't matter because this is a one-way proposition bet.
02:08I'm a rainmaker, not a gambler.
02:10And we don't owe any money.
02:14We simply deliver rain upon request.
02:17In the language of a con, a rainmaker is the closer.
02:23Certainty in an uncertain world.
02:25He doesn't promise effort. He promises outcomes.
02:29And when people are desperate, nervous, and afraid, a rainmaker can step in with confidence, timing, and just enough proof to feel real.
02:40Well, he frames coincidence as skill and luck as leverage when success follows.
02:46But only when that success follows.
02:50That's when he takes all the credit and usually the money.
02:56And if the rain doesn't come, oh, that's not his fault.
03:01It's just the conditions just happen to be wrong.
03:04A rainmaker doesn't control reality. He controls belief.
03:10And belief, when the stakes are high enough, is often more valuable than truth itself.
03:18By the way, if you already agreed to our bet, no backsies.
03:22And don't feel bad because you're in good company.
03:25The city of San Diego, California, at a crucial moment in their history amidst a historic drought, agreed to the very same bet.
03:34In 1915, a man walked into town and made a guarantee.
03:39He would fill that empty reservoir with rainwater.
03:42And once it was topped off, he was going to collect over $300,000 adjusted for today's inflation.
03:49Now, before you judge that city council, please know, this guy's not some kind of kooky religious leader.
03:56Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
03:58This is a man of science.
04:00This man promises to emit a secret blend of chemicals into the air.
04:05Oh, and he's got a list of references a mile long.
04:11This process has worked again and again.
04:14All right, maybe you could judge them a little bit. But get this.
04:21In San Diego, in 1915, it rains.
04:24And a few months later, the same man comes to the city council to collect.
04:32He gestures to the now full reservoir.
04:35He waves his hands at the now green hills of San Diego.
04:40But the council, the council doesn't greet him with joy because he's no hero to them.
04:47To them, he may well be liable for murder.
04:51This is the story of a man who promised to do the impossible, the deadly consequences, and the decision by a city council to either pay him for a job well done or stiff him to protect the future of a budding metropolis.
05:08Cons don't fool us because we're stupid.
05:11They fool us because we're human.
05:13And the tale of Charles Hatfield, the Rainmaker, just might be...
05:22the world's greatest con.
05:33It's 1915, and you've just been elected to the city council of San Diego.
05:49Your mandate is simple. Growth.
05:52Everything is about to get better.
05:55After 10 years of American grit, the Panama Canal is now open, connecting the Caribbean and the Pacific.
06:04That means shipping to and from the Golden State is about to explode.
06:09The state of California decides to celebrate.
06:12They'll have a World's Fair level exhibition.
06:15They'll show the world what the Pacific Coast has to offer.
06:19They'll entice tourists from around the world to see a state they can move to, a place they can start a business, a place they can call home.
06:28The state's going to bless one city with a charter.
06:31San Diego scores that.
06:33We got a clear pipeline to convert tourists into taxpayers.
06:37And that charter goes to, you guessed it, San Francisco. Wait, what?
06:44San Diego can't compete with the money of the Bay Area.
06:49And so the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition is approved and opens in 1915.
06:54Meanwhile, our nascent city of San Diego will forge ahead.
07:00San Diego is the first port of call in America once you get past the canal.
07:06We're the city that deserves the attention. So screw it.
07:09The city throws its own exhibition.
07:12They're not looking for spectacle.
07:13They're looking for intimacy.
07:15They want people to see themselves as future San Diego citizens.
07:20They take city land and build Balboa Park.
07:23They commission the construction of the California Tower, a new bridge, and they build an outdoor amphitheater to showcase the year-long beautiful weather.
07:32The Panama-California Exposition opens right around the same time as its neighbor up to the north and is immediately outdrawn.
07:4219 million people go to San Francisco, 4 million, almost 4 million, pretty much 4 million, end up in San Diego.
07:52But eventually, that massive spectacle up north has to come down.
07:58And since San Diego's construction was designed to be more permanent, I got an idea.
08:04Let's just extend the event.
08:07And so they do.
08:091916's gonna be a year without competition from San Francisco.
08:13And, in a macabre twist of fate, domestic tourism is up since there's a little world war heating up over in Europe.
08:21This is the moment.
08:231916's gonna be the year.
08:25All's delightful on our western front.
08:29Just one little problem.
08:31San Diego, it's a bit, uh, parched, shall we say.
08:36It's in a massive drought.
08:39And with all the visitors, it's hard to sell a future in a town with water insecurity.
08:45The reservoirs are low, the rainfall's unreliable, and the city knows it can't reach the future it imagines without a miracle from the sky.
08:55A year earlier, the city council paid a whopping $4 million to buy into ownership of the local water company, the largest privately owned utility in the area.
09:06And while this gave the city the ability to own its own water demands, you could only make a system like this work if you have the rain.
09:14And unfortunately, San Diego don't.
09:16It's in the middle of a drought that's bringing back some of the worst memories of the late 19th century, back when the city's population faced a seven-year absence of a single drop of rain.
09:29At this moment, the lower Otay Reservoir is practically bone dry.
09:34In theory, this place could hold upwards of 15 billion gallons of water, but it's water that just simply hasn't materialized.
09:43If only it would rain.
09:47But there's a man, they say.
09:51A man who can change the weather.
09:54Why, in Los Angeles, he was paid to make it rain, and he did it on command.
10:01He's got testimonials from ranchers up and down the coast.
10:04Charles Hatfield, the rainmaker.
10:05Hatfield isn't a carnival barker.
10:10He didn't sell himself with big gestures or wild promises.
10:16This guy speaks plainly, carefully, like a man who's considered every possible objection before he even arrived.
10:25This man tells the council, yeah, he could produce rain, real rain, of course, measurable rain.
10:33That's what we're looking for here, right?
10:36And he could do it using a special mixture of chemicals he'd release into the air.
10:41Yeah, he'd build these tall wooden towers, precipitation plants he called them, and he could build them right around one of San Diego's largest dams.
10:50He didn't like the word rainmaker.
10:54He calls himself a moisture accelerator, a phrase that sounded just scientific enough to command attention without inviting too many technical questions.
11:03By the 20th century, the very idea of rainmaking felt out of touch with advancing scientific community standards.
11:12Hatfield's pitch is educated, patient.
11:14He explains evaporation rates, atmospheric conditions, talks about coaxing latent moisture to form around nucleation points so it can fall as precipitation.
11:25It isn't chemistry in the academic sense, and it certainly isn't meteorology, but it had just enough modern scientific flavor that the council thought they weren't dealing with a nut job.
11:40Now, of course, Hatfield remains vague about the process.
11:45He needs to protect his secrets.
11:47He never discloses the ingredients of his rainmaking mixture, and he's careful not to invite too much scrutiny.
11:54What he does speak about are results, and he's got the receipts. Twice in L. A.
12:00, once down the coast in Bonesaw, a few times for ranchers on demand in the Central Valley, and he has testimonials from all of them.
12:09And to San Diego, he offers the exact same offer.
12:14If I make it rain, you pay me.
12:17If I don't, you do not.
12:20What could be more fair?
12:22The council debated the offer.
12:25There were some that thought Hatfield was a fraud, a crank, a quack, a dreamer, maybe at best a confused lucky guy with some expertise.
12:34But the way Hatfield behaved, something about that surprised him.
12:38Something about that disarmed him.
12:41Charles' reputation was, by all accounts, fairly positive, but even still, no one expected him to come off as so professional.
12:51Charles also preferred keeping his contracts short and to the point, and so, amid some skepticism, it becomes clear that San Diego is leaning towards giving him a chance.
13:02The contract read as follows.
13:04If Charles filled the Morena Reservoir within a year, the city of San Diego would pay him to the tune of $10,000.
13:13If Charles didn't meet this goal, the city walked away scot-free, regardless of how much water was in that dam.
13:21What could be simpler?
13:23In terms of raw numbers, Charles would need to deliver about 10 billion gallons of water, on top of the 5 billion that currently sat in that reserve.
13:34As one councilman put it, it's heads we win, tails he loses.
13:38That was all Hatfield needed.
13:40Curiosity or no, the council was taking every possible precaution to solve the problem.
13:46Is this a weird play? Yes. Is it speculative? Of course. Is it scientific? Who freaking knows.
13:53Curiosity or no, the council has to take every possible precaution to solve the number one problem they're going to face as the whole world is about to show up for a party.
14:05They need water, it's gotta rain.
14:07And so, the rainmaker got to work.
14:11Along with his brother Paul, Hatfield begins construction on a wooden tower near the shoreline of the Marina Reservoir.
14:18Nothing substantial, barely noticeable on the horizon, just 14 square feet at the base.
14:24There was a married couple who lived on site.
14:27They were going to serve as the Hatfields' connection to the city.
14:32Weeks pass, the holidays are over, Christmas decorations come down, and Charles gets to work.
14:39From the top of the tower, he releases his chemical mixture.
14:44Vapors drift into the wind, the contents of which are a mystery to everyone but himself.
14:51But they were definitely not unnoticeable.
14:54According to the dam keeper, the chemical stench was so powerful that it reached his home a mile away.
15:03The odor was foul enough for one person to call it, quote, a Limburger cheese factory that had broken loose.
15:11In fact, it was something of an attraction.
15:14People began traveling out just to watch him.
15:16Curious neighbors wanted to see the man who claimed he could command the weather.
15:21Some laughed, some squinted at the horizon as if trying to witness the exact moment the clouds might obey.
15:28Even the skeptics couldn't resist checking the sky.
15:32And on January 5th, just a couple days after first releasing his secret spices into the air, it happens.
15:42Rain falls on San Diego.
15:44And I'm not talking about a drizzle or a polite afternoon shower.
15:51I mean real rain, cold, steady, and hard enough to be noticed almost immediately by the city officials who had signed that contract.
16:01The newspapers mentioned it, residents talked about it.
16:06That strange moisture accelerator out by Marina, that seemed to be doing something.
16:12Could it be that they were witnessing a breakthrough in atmospheric science?
16:18That storm put 48 million gallons of water into the reservoir.
16:24Of course, that's far from the 10 billion gallons Charles Hatfield had promised, but it was enough to get the ball rolling.
16:33For you on the city council, things are looking great.
16:38Crazy man goes up on the horizon, builds a tower, gray clouds coming in.
16:43I wouldn't blame you if you're smiling.
16:46Enjoy it, because it's not going to last for long.
16:50Charles Mallory Hatfield, born 1875 on a farm outside of Fort Scott, Kansas.
17:00His dad's a Quaker and a sewing machine salesman who travels constantly and drills his children in persistence, persuasion, and self-reliance.
17:10Charles' childhood isn't marked by tragedy or dysfunction.
17:14If anything, it's almost aggressively normal.
17:17Chores, church, school, and a dad who insists that there's always one more sale if you just knock on just one more door.
17:28Picture Charles as a kid, fascinated by his mother's tea kettle, watching as the steam attracts water vapor. Huh.
17:36If you could control weather on a stove, why not in the air?
17:41This epiphany, this moment, according to Hatfield, is the first step on his quest to find a chemical compound that could effectively magnetize, maybe even generate, clouds.
17:52Hatfield says he would read whatever material he could find about atmospheric science, which in the early 1900s is a mix of legitimate meteorology, experimental chemistry, and outright folklore and speculation.
18:08But he'd go to the library again and again, each time finding different chemical combinations to try at home.
18:17He'd experiment and jot down his findings.
18:19Let's see here, electricity, evaporation, temperature gradients, time of day, lunar cycle.
18:26Back to the library, more mixtures, more experiments.
18:31Eventually, he says he finds 27 different chemicals that he believes would attract moisture in the atmosphere so it could be released as rain.
18:44He built small towers, burned his mixtures, recorded the results, and refined his formulas.
18:50Now, of course, none of this would satisfy a modern day scientist, and to be honest, it also did not satisfy the old tiny scientists.
19:01But it did satisfy Hatfield.
19:03He believed, genuinely believed, that he was onto something, even if nobody else could yet see it.
19:11Finally, after months of experimentation, he shares his findings with his family.
19:17According to Hatfield, he manages to directly pull in an inch of rain in an otherwise hot Los Angeles day.
19:26To Charles' mind, he'd found his calling, but it was far from his profession.
19:31No matter how much Hatfield's father believed in these experiments, he relied on Charles as a salesman, working from farm to farm, county to county, pitching those sewing machines just like his dear old dad.
19:45And it's during this time that Hatfield develops the skills to sell his new passion.
19:51He learns to read rooms quickly, to soften objections before they're spoken aloud, and most importantly, he learns to hold someone's attention long enough to make an improbable idea sound possible.
20:04By the time Hatfield is a full-grown adult, he has a zealot's faith matched with the persuasiveness of a traveling salesman.
20:12And so, he starts offering his services to small towns and ranchers, usually for modest fees or contingent contracts.
20:21To put it plainly, if it rains, you pay.
20:26If it doesn't, you don't.
20:28And from there, the shadow grows.
20:30The story of a tall, quiet man who climbed a tower, released some vapors, and made water fall from the sky.
20:39And when the rain falls, so does the coin.
20:43A thousand here, four thousand there.
20:46Hatfield kept meticulous logs, collecting his testimonials like trophies.
20:50And he presented himself not as a magician, a wizard, or a shaman, just a simple technician with one weird trick. A moisture accelerator.
21:01A man of science.
21:04So far, too precious by half.
21:10I don't know about you, but this whole goody-goody story, which comes entirely from Hatfield, by the way, makes me a little curious.
21:19Sure, you got a kid who's legitimately into weather patterns, has to work as a salesman on the side.
21:26To hear Hatfield tell it, this is the story of somebody who truly thinks he can make it rain.
21:32But let me just throw this out there.
21:34What if he doesn't so much know how to make it rain, or even believe he knows how to make it rain?
21:40What if the code he cracked was on how to take credit for the rain?
21:45What if all that time in the library is spent learning about cyclical weather patterns?
21:50The pendulum swing of drought and rainfall that gets lost in the day-to-day, but is clear as day when you're looking at historic almanacs stretching back for decades.
22:02What if, just saying, what if Hatfield knows that he could go to a town where historically rain is due to fall?
22:13At that moment, that just happens to historically be when citizens are the most desperate for it.
22:22He makes a promise that is genuinely out of his control, but is likely to happen.
22:30What if what he's pulling is the equivalent of a Las Vegas card counter, only gambling when he knows the deck is stacked in his favor?
22:40Feels like you'd have a pretty good conversion rate on that.
22:45What's that tower for?
22:48I mean, mathematically speaking, that tower doesn't get you that much closer to the clouds, does it?
22:55If you're just taking credit for the rain, it seems like you could do that without carpentry.
23:02But Hatfield does make sure to legit build the towers, and he legit does release something into the air, something so pungent that it can be smelled for miles around.
23:13It's like a press release, making sure that no one is confused as to who is responsible for what comes next.
23:22Now, this is just a jaded magician slash podcaster talking here.
23:26But what if the mixture wasn't so much optimized to coax rain from the sky, but hypothetically was designed to cement the attention of his audience? Make that association.
23:39Big rain clouds come after the big old stinky cheese fart.
23:45Is Charles Hatfield a con man who saw a hustle by understanding just enough about rain patterns to come in and cash in at just the right time?
23:58Or is he a true believer, misguided or not, somebody who genuinely thought he had discovered the new frontier of atmospheric science?
24:07Either way, the facts are plain.
24:09Hatfield did put his vapor in the air, and sometimes, like in San Diego, it rained.
24:15Now, the problem for Hatfield in our story is that it doesn't stop raining.
24:20By January 12th, things are looking good for Charles' chances to fill that reservoir.
24:34The total runoff at Morena is at 186 million gallons for the season, more than double what was produced a year before.
24:42And almost all of that rainfall made its way to the coast over just the last four days.
24:50Now, either Charles was the madman responsible for such a massive increase, or the lucky beneficiary.
24:58Either way, his efforts seem to be working.
25:01Now, that doesn't guarantee that Morena is going to fill in time, though.
25:07The city council, meanwhile, is thrilled.
25:09Imagine betting on the very best possible outcome.
25:11Free rainfall that fills up the reservoir, but not enough to hit the payday?
25:18How perfect would that be?
25:20You'd get nearly all the water you want for a total bill of zero dollars.
25:26Except the rain kept coming.
25:28It didn't stop on January 13th.
25:31It didn't stop on January 14th.
25:34This rain wasn't stopping anytime soon.
25:38That's something important that could get lost in a story like this.
25:45We live in a totally different world of weather warnings.
25:49The folks in San Diego, citizens of 1916, they didn't know about Doppler radar systems.
25:54That didn't become commonplace until the mid-20th century.
25:57The modern National Weather Service wasn't even established until the 1970s.
26:02And of course, nowadays, we have their watches and warnings beamed to us live on our phones.
26:08But to be back in San Diego, back in the days of this story, they've got barometric pressure and wind direction. That's it.
26:17They have no idea and no way to know how long this storm's gonna last.
26:23And so, the rain keeps falling.
26:26Hardware stores sell out of buckets, raincoats, boots.
26:29By Friday evening, the city feels deserted.
26:33All the muddied streets render those newfangled automobiles useless.
26:37And another half inch of rain splatters onto the city's sidewalks that night.
26:43Back out at Morena, Charles and his brother pass time with rounds of checkers.
26:50While an additional 10 million gallons of rain flows into the reservoir, another 1.
26:552 inches of rain had fallen in just eight hours.
26:58Ask anyone in San Diego, and it was not a question.
27:02Oh, that's Hatfield's rain, all right.
27:04You could practically taste the cheese stink on it.
27:07What seemed to me borderline inevitable, a drought destroying the chances for San Diego, is fading away like a distant memory.
27:16Soon, when all the attendees of the big expo show up, sure, maybe San Diego would be a bit waterlogged, but drought wouldn't be on their mind.
27:27Better a few puddles than water insecurity.
27:29People traveled out to the reservoir with umbrellas and slickers just to watch the levels rise.
27:35Newspapers ran hopeful headlines.
27:37San Diego finally had water.
27:39But as storm after storm continued, the mood began to change.
27:46Sunday's paper ran a letter to the editor that read just eight words.
27:53For the love of Mike, call him off.
27:56Forecasters said that the rain could end as early as Monday, but even that seemed too late.
28:02Overnight, four different telegraph companies lose the connection between San Diego and Los Angeles.
28:07Those downed lines meant that information was becoming difficult to exchange, potentially life-saving information, like evacuation orders for the people about to be flooded.
28:16And yet the rain kept coming. At 2 a. m.
28:21, the San Diego River floods, sending water rushing towards Mission Valley. By 4 a. m.
28:28, the first floor of a fever hospital north of the Tijuana River is seven feet deep with water.
28:34And yet the rain kept coming.
28:36By Monday, wooden structures are splintering and collapsing.
28:40Rail lines are washed out.
28:43Livestock disappears into the current.
28:45Fields of crops are transformed into seaweed in all but appearance.
28:51Houses, literal complete houses, float down the valley, never to be seen again.
28:58Downtown, people are piling into canoes, attempting to find anybody still clinging on for survival and bring them hope. Some are found. Others are lost.
29:10At a dog pound, all but one pup is washed away, never to be seen again.
29:17Back at Morena, the rain gauge shows a staggering 910 million additional gallons, just shy of 10% of the entire amount Charles needs in just the last 24 hours.
29:31Meanwhile, way up in the hills, Morena is now at over 6 billion gallons filled.
29:39I like to imagine Charles is about to say, when he thinks to himself, oh boy, San Diego, what were you thinking not believing in me, Charles Hatfield?
29:50A little more chemicals, another round of checkers and then let me check in maybe a phone call because Charles is on his way to pulling this thing off he's about to earn $10,000 they're in the middle of this storm he calls the water impoundment office and when somebody answers he doesn't take credit for the flood he doesn't say you're welcome no magnanimous gestures at all instead he promises that he's gonna show San Diego quote real rain and he slams the phone down one week later January 19th a beleaguered San Diego continues to deal with this persistent rain it's not as heavy now as it had been but it is unrelenting nonetheless always just enough rain to prevent any true cleaning up people died trying to save their houses others fell over capsized boats and water so deep they couldn't tread the city's water system now has 7.
31:056 billion gallons of water that wasn't there before and there's another 8.
31:105 billion gallons up in Morena even though inflows are at 90 million gallons per the reservoir is still only half full nearby other dams weren't so lucky the Sweetwater Dam had already pushed well past capacity the lower Otay Dam was in a similar spot capable of holding 11 billion gallons but was already at 9 billion this is fine as long as the rain stops soon and just like that it did on Thursday January 20th San Diego saw its first burst of sunshine in weeks farmers breathing a sigh of relief finally start to tally up the damage to their farms homeowners begin preparing their repair lists one man managed to float a loose grain silo over a mile downstream back to his ranch and travelers including those precious tourists who were coming out for the big out of town if you've ever been through a bad storm like a blizzard or a hurricane you know this feeling that reassuring first blast of sunshine you feel those fists relax the knuckles not so white this is that moment that first time you could feel yourself let go take a deep breath it's a big feeling allowing that anxiety to leave your chest and Thursday evening as the Sun set over a waterlogged San Diego it felt like for the first time there was hope and by Friday it felt like a new chapter had begun in the city but come Monday morning the Hatfields are still a billion or so gallons away from their big payday and so it's back to work they go they replace some equipment that had gotten a bit rusty and yet again another plume of chemicals rises to the air cheese stank goes up everyone smells it and just like clockwork gray clouds start rolling on in the rain starts around 730 p. m.
33:33Wednesday January 26th for some San Diego citizens this will be the last rainstorm they ever see alarm sound across the neighborhoods a dam in Balboa Park overflows they have to manually collapse it to let the floodwaters slowly rush into the streets instead of breaking all the infrastructure and it only gets worse from there wind picks up across the region in Mission Valley one of the region's main bridges is seen floating down the rushing waters of the San Diego River a railway bridge follows soon after Sweetwater Dam already past capacity fills with new rain so quickly the spillways become completely ineffective but it was the lower Otay Dam the same one that was bone-dry a month ago that packs the killing blow with rain pouring down the lower Otay Dam fails unleashing a catastrophic wall of water that rips through farms and settlements with a force that no one had imagined according to conflicting reports upwards of 50 souls don't survive to see the morning the damage is staggering three and a half million dollars over 100 million dollars today oh the city had water yeah but at a cost so high and in the middle of that chaos of that destruction of that loss of life perched up in the horizon playing checkers with his brother is Charles Hatfield because oh yeah while those other dams failed and those other people died Morena surpassed 10 billion gallons set a new record gonna get himself a sweet little $10,000 payday in the process when the storms finally subside for good this time after nearly a month of punishment the question that no one had seriously considered suddenly lands on your agenda the matter of payment to one Charles Hatfield While Charles is on his way to your office let me ask you a present-tense question do you think cloud seeding is real like have we just cracked the science since old timey days because on the one hand this might be the story of a lone nut taking credit for a giant storm for $10,000 but what if I told you that globally we still spend half a billion dollars every year doing exactly this we are cloud seeding we are making it rain or at least we're spending the money like we are per the GAO Utah appropriated five million dollars for seeding every year Colorado spends 1.
36:545 million dollars Wyoming spent three hundred and twenty thousand dollars just last year North Dakota spent eight hundred thousand dollars so what are they buying seasonal reports indicate that we get a five to fifteen percent increase in precipitation it's not bad right usually when we're talking about cloud seeding we're talking about creating a nucleation point all you got to do is scatter tiny particles usually silver iodide into a cloud and each of those particles give moisture something to cling on to that nucleation point begins to grow the droplets form they freeze and they fall either as rain or a snow might not be weather on demand but it's definitely weather nudged in the right direction we know for a fact that the UAE launched a whole fleet of cloud seeding planes to try to manipulate and twist the weather as much as it could China famously seeded clouds just before the 2008 Beijing Olympics and of course Colorado and Nevada do it for snowpack in fact if you live anywhere in the American West there's a non-zero chance you have personally benefited from artificial precipitation without ever even realizing it but here's the rub does it work by which what I'm trying to ask is does it work like to clarify cloud seeding does it work in a lab it's simple we can create an A and a B condition see the difference see the different results out there in the sky sure we did a thing in a rain did the one cause the other is it all weather theater just backed by inconsistent data and optimistic interpretations of storm patterns are we spending billions of dollars trying to answer a simple question how much rain can we actually make when truthfully the answer is nowadays meteorologists argue over the methodology the math the controls they run computer models and statistical comparisons way more fancy and sophisticated than anything that could have happened back in 1916 knowing that you cannot know that remains stubbornly familiar and every time the debate resurfaces Hatfield's ghost shows up again more than 100 years after Charles was in his rain making prime none of us if we're making the weather or just getting paid to take credit for it take our old friend San Diego for example in 1990s you're not gonna believe this guys San Diego was experiencing a drought and stop if you've heard this one before but in 1990 they hired somebody who claimed they could increase the chances of precipitation San Diego hired Dan Keady to fly a twin-engine plane over the city and see the clouds now this is almost modern-day San Diego so they didn't part with some foolish $10,000 of 1915 money oh no that would have come out to around a hundred and thirty thousand dollars at the time the smarter wiser San Diego paid Dan Keady a hundred and fifty thousand dollars but that time at least nobody died which brings us back to the matter of Mr. Hatfield it's February 1916 just days after the floodwaters have finally receded Charles Hatfield walks into City Hall calm as ever and asks to be paid the council hesitates I mean they just spent the last few days surveying the damage to property both public and private they're in the middle of processing the human loss of life and now there's this Hatfield guy looking to get paid because he believes he engineered a once-in-a-century flood come on timing aside there's a legal question here because if the council pays Hatfield then the council is on the record admitting that he created the storm and if he created the storm then every lawsuit from every farmer landowner business destroyed in that flood could point to that payment as proof of the city's negligence proof that the city had hired him knowing that he would alter the weather their contract would become exhibit a in a tidal wave of and the city's lawyers agreed if you compensate the rainmaker you own the rain okay says Hatfield I could see it's a little bit complicated a lot of ins and outs of what have you if you're worried about the damage done by my heroic filling of your reservoir then let's just get a judge to rule on it yeah let's have a judge decide if I'm liable the city officials decline they don't want a ruling they want this to go away here's the official line that rain they decide was natural your tower did nothing Hatfield I hope you enjoyed playing checkers your chemicals were not just stinky they were useless your reputation your process your claims all irrelevant you see this damage that was an unrelated act of God yes an unrelated act of God that nobody could have seen coming and also legally we never executed the contract so hit the bricks Chuck Hatfield reputation on the line kept pushing he offered to take less than $10,000 call it a bulk discount maybe $4,000 no attempting to save face Hatfield went to the press he explained he's just a humble moisture accelerator not a damn reinforcer the city made a deal and they should pay up eventually he sued the city the city sued back the ensuing legal drama lasted until 1938 22 years after the rain fell the eventual ruling Hatfield didn't cause the rain and therefore couldn't be liable and yet by then the real goal of the City Council had long been achieved San Diego was an honest-to-god boomtown from 1916 to 1938 they doubled in population thanks to a naval expansion an interwar boom and a New Deal infrastructure build-out in fact in 1937 as a pick-me-up during the Great and they hosted the California Pacific International Exposition in Balboa Park a deliberate sequel to the 1915 event many of the Art Deco buildings constructed for that Expo are still standing today as for Hatfield he kept on keeping on going city to city traveling internationally as far as Honduras by the time he died in 1958 he claimed he had successfully made rain over 500 times, but of all of them, San Diego was his masterpiece.
44:55Did he make it rain?
44:57How can you tell?
44:58Critics point out that it's impossible to know since Hatfield always showed up right at the beginning of seasonal rainy periods.
45:09But then again, if it was raining, you wouldn't call the rainmaker.
45:13So this is the problem with Hatfield.
45:15Is he a con artist or a true believer?
45:19If he's a con artist, then he knows that he was not affecting the weather.
45:25He knew that he was running a grift.
45:28He knew that he was using coincidence as skill and luck as leverage.
45:33And by God, he had one target.
45:36Give me that 10 grand.
45:37He's just a rainmaker.
45:39But if he thought he made it rain, if he's a true believer, then that means after the entire city of San Diego had flooded, after there was untold devastation, after dozens of people lost their lives, believing that he was the force that caused that, he chose to release more smoke into the air.
46:00And after all of that, he asks for $10,000 and fights for it.
46:07Which one of these Hatfields are we more comfortable with?
46:11A con man who wanted five figures or a true believer playing God?
46:16Of course, we'll never know.
46:18Mystery of that question is why we're still talking about it today.
46:24It's why in the lead to the Los Angeles Times article in 1990, when they talked about some fly-by-night twin engine pilots seeding the clouds, the opening line compared him to Charles Hatfield.
46:35The story of Charles Hatfield is inextricably tied to the DNA of a major American city.
46:41And depending on how you want to squint, he's either a mad genius comfortable with dozens drowning for a five-figure payday, but I'll sleep better at night if I just think of him as the world's greatest con.
46:56This episode of World's Greatest Con was written by Will Sattelberg and me, Brian Brushwood, your humble host.
47:05The show was executive produced by Justin Robert Young, production and research by Dog and Pony Show Audio in Austin, Texas.
47:27Credit to The Wizard of Sun City, The Strange True Story of Charles Hatfield, The Rainmaker Who Drowned a City's Dreams by Gary Jenkins, which, along with contemporary news articles, retrospectives and archived video made for the bulk of our research.
47:55Of course, you've got questions.
47:57We want to answer as many as we can.
48:00So hit us up at worldsgreatestcon at gmail. com.
48:03Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this broker.