Robert St George Dyrenforth's unsuccessful attempts in 1891 to squeeze rainfall from reluctant clouds were featured yesterday in Weather Eye. He was followed some years later by Charles Hatfield, who had similar ambitions but a different methodology - and rather more success.
Charles Malory Hatfield was born in Kansas in 1875. According to himself, his first experiments were carried out in the kitchen, during which he noticed that certain chemical combinations seemed to cause steam from the kettle to drift in their direction.
When he turned professional rain-maker in 1905, Hatfield's methods were both impressive and enigmatic: a number of large towers 20 or 30 feet high would be erected where the rain was needed, each surmounted by a vat of boiling liquid to which he added secret chemicals, 23 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 followed shortly afterwards.
A number of spectacular successes at "tickling the clouds to tears", as some of the newspapers liked to put it, ensured that Hatfield's expertise was widely publicised.
Over the next 20 years he paid great attention to the law of averages, and time and time again was able to provide a plentiful supply of rainfall after a period of drought; one success for every dozen failures was more than enough to fuel a financially rewarding business.
Before long he was able to envisage more ambitious undertakings. "I would like to have the contract for watering the Sahara Desert," he declared, "as soon as the French government can be made to appreciate that I really can make as much rain as my employers order."
In 1924 the Los Angeles Times summed up Hatfield's public image rather well: "Some think that Hatfield is merely a great showman; others think something less complimentary; but some, and always enough for his purposes, think him a man ahead of his time who can achieve what modern science and the US Weather Bureau say is quite impossible."
No one ever convincingly showed 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 unique talent for promoting, flamboyantly, his own perceived achievements.
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 to have featured in the chequered history of pluviculture down the years.