SOMETIMES, when a crisis looms, there also appears a knight in shining armour to retrieve the situation just in time. For example, those whose lot it is to worry about the possibility of water shortages during the current drought might usefully recall the exploits of Charles M. Hatfield in California 80 years ago.
For all we know, there may be a latter day hydrological hero of his ilk in Ireland, waiting to be asked to save the day.
Charles Malory Hatfield claimed that he could make it rain. He turned professional in 1905, and when asked to intervene he would erect a number of towers 20 or 30 ft in height in the area where rain was needed, each tower surmounted by a vat of boiling liquid to which he added secret chemicals, 23 of them in all. He did not claim that this concoction brought the rain it merely attracted the clouds to the locality, so Hatfield said, and the rain just followed shortly afterwards.
A number of alleged spectacular successes ensured that Hatfield's expertise was widely publicised, and in 1915 he obtained his biggest contract ever. After a number of rainless months, the city fathers of San Diego, California, sent for him, and he agreed to fill their reservoirs to overflowing for a modest fee of $10,000. He set up his towers and began rain making and the rain duly came, and came, and came again! There was widespread flooding in the ensuing weeks houses were washed away, and finally the Otay Dam collapsed with the loss of many lives.
Understandably, the city council blamed the tragedy on the man who conjured up the rain, and sued him. In due course, however, the Californian Supreme Court ruled that the rain was an "act of God", and that Hatfield had nothing to do with the disasters - but at least since the rain was now declared by law to be an act of God, it was obviously not an act of Mr Hatfield, and so his fee of $10,000 was withheld by the powers that be in San Diego.
No one ever showed convincingly that Hatfield was a fraud. In fact he seems to have been an honest, decent man who genuinely, if mistakenly, believed that his methods were effective, and who also had a talent for promoting his perceived achievements in a most flamboyant way. He continued in business until the early 1930s, and then retired to live quietly until his death in 1958 - a controversial and elusive figure, but one of the most colourful ever to have featured in the chequered history of pluviculture down the years.