Well, what would you say if someone told you that such technology has not just been around for years or even decades, but for more than a century? A man named Charles Mallory Hatfield, born into a Quaker family in Fort Scott, Kan., in 1875, is one of the earliest known weather makers.
Dubbed "the rainmaker," Hatfield would state during his upbringing that his greatest ambition in life was pluviculture, or the science of "rainmaking." He would leave his family business in 1904 to pursue this dream. (Related: Check out this list of patents suggesting that weather manipulation is happening all around us.)
History states that Hatfield developed a secret rainmaking mixture containing 23 different ingredients, two of them being dynamite and nitroglycerin. By unleashing this mystery concoction into the atmosphere via evaporator tanks, Hatfield discovered that it was possible to create artificial rain.
"The key is for there to be clouds in the sky, and to chemically force the water from said clouds to fall to the ground," reports explain about the more primitive and imprecise nature of what Hatfield had available to him at that time.
San Diego county paid Hatfield $10,000 ($294,000 in today's terms) to add 15 billion gallons of water to area reservoir
At the time when Hatfield discovered this technology, the area in which he worked was suffering through extreme drought conditions. It was the desert climate of Southern California, after all, which has been facing a "changing" climate, so to speak, for many centuries.
These changes are natural, of course, and have absolutely nothing to do with human activity. But the point is that the state had water problems even back then, and weather manipulation was on the docket at the time for use as a tool to combat it.
Hatfield was able to forge a deal guaranteeing 18 inches of rain in just five months. He was paid $1,000, the equivalent of about $33,000 today, to make it all happen. By 1915, he would become a superstar for successfully completing his mission.
The rain Hatfield was able to produce helped keep cotton growers in business, as well as miners and others across several southwestern states and territories. Over time, his pay rate increased to $4,000, or about $130,000 in today's inflated terms.
Hatfield's efforts were so consistently successful that San Diego County would eventually pay him $10,000, or the equivalent of $294,000 today, to fill up an entire area reservoir with 15 billion gallons of water.
According to materials housed at the San Diego Public Library, the effort was a success – and was actually too successful in that heavy rains throughout the area actually caused major flooding.
The Lower Otai Dam would end up breaking not long after, killing 19 people as a 20-foot-high wall of water came pouring across the area. Still, San Diego would get the water it needed, all thanks to Hatfield's atmospheric chemical blasting technology.
There is a lot more to the story that you can read about at this link, but suffice it to say that artificial rain has been a real-life thing since the early 1900s.
And keep in mind that rainmaking and other weather-altering technologies have only become more sophisticated since that time, allowing geoengineers the ability to not only create rain but also prevent it (i.e., intentional droughts).
If you enjoyed reading this story, you will find more like it at Geoengineering.news.
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