Was “Rainmaker” Charles Hatfield A Con Man Or Brilliant Scientist?
Was the controversial headline maker an innovative scientist who could control the weather or someone taking advantage of people to make money?
Charles Hatfield, best known as the “Rainmaker,” was a notorious figure in early 20th-century America. He made a career of getting paid large amounts of money to use his proprietary chemical blend to produce rain in areas desperately seeking moisture. No stranger to running afoul of the law, he also seemed to be inordinately successful with rain appearing after he treated an affected area, leading to the question of whether he was a genuine scientific genius or merely a brilliant con man.
Hatfield was born in Kansas in 1875. His family moved to Southern California when he was just a child. As a young man, he worked as a sewing machine salesman, but became very interested in weather and the various scientific theories behind it. This led him to experiment with different chemicals, and he eventually came to claim that he could influence the weather with a special formula that he innovated.
Boasting a secret mixture of 23 chemicals that he claimed would induce rain when fully evaporated, Hatfield built tall wooden towers and placed containers of his…
