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You're listening to American Shadows, a production of I Heart Radio and Greyman miles from Aaron Minkey. Liquid water, it sets are magnificent Blue Planet apart from others in our solar system. True, Venus and Mars both had water at some point, but evaporation turned them into toxic, airless deserts, void of life, and yet somehow Earth's water didn't evaporate. It's why there's life on this big blue marble we call home without water. Most plants other than cactuses die within a week.

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Humans and most other animals perish.

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In three or four days, entire civilizations thrived because of water or ceased to exist without it. And since not every community lived near running water, they depended on rain from the Sudan. In Savannah to the American plains, animals have followed the rains and humans migrated with them. Without life giving rain, plants would die and the animals that the humans depended on went elsewhere. In the American southwest, summers are dry, Native American peoples like the Hopi, Mojave and Pueblo once performed rain dances every year.

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To this day, some still recreate these traditions. The clothing, singing and intricate movements were hoped to please the gods in descending rain and rain. Making rituals have been practiced around the world. Rain has been considered sacred, as have the practices and people who helped control it. Unless sometimes those people were women. You see for a while during the Little Ice Age, in some European cultures, women who attempted to alter nature were thought to be up to nefarious purposes.

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It was the devil's doing their persecutors set. Women, being the weaker sex, were easily tempted by Satan. And any use of spells, potions or dances to alter the weather would only end in disaster if there was a hailstorm, snowstorm or torrential rains that threatened life clearly, which was at fault, and thousands of women were killed for it. Historians have noted that over 50000 executions occurred in Europe alone. In an old German woodcut, a woman practicing witchcraft is clearly depicted, her crime conjuring an enormous hailstorm.

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Later, European men took to the craft. Although the art was considered more scientific and a whole lot less satanic, they were looked upon as heroes and innovators, even when things didn't turn out quite the way everyone hoped. It's been several hundred years since witches were first accused of meddling with the climate. Since then, we've often tried to improve upon nature in other ways that don't include elaborate dances or spells. But despite our advances in technology, when it comes to controlling the weather and our intentions for doing so, the forecast, it seems, is cloudy.

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I'm Lauren Voegele, mom. Welcome to American Chateaux. In the late 1980s, American citizens mostly lived within 50 or so miles of the Atlantic Ocean. Something President Thomas Jefferson wanted to end if American settlers didn't expand out West, he feared that the English would. His vision was to spread people over the land far and wide. And within two years, he convinced Congress to support an expedition toward the Pacific Ocean to kick things off. He sent Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark on their epic journey starting in 1883, part of their duties, aside from determining the economic potential of the land they explored, were scientific.

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Along the way, the men were to journal everything they encountered from identifying plants and animals to notes on the geography. Climate was important to settlers would need to know how the weather might affect growing seasons. When Lewis and Clark first laid eyes on what they called the great American desert, they deemed it unfit to live on the land was parched as far as they could see. The local Native American peoples didn't stay there year round. They only passed through following the bison, the modern name of that area, Nebraska prairie grass and other short grasses grew, of course, but nothing like back east where grasses rose taller than a wagon wheel.

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Years later, when the rains did come to the dry plains, it softened the Earth's baked soil. By the late 80s, the great American desert would disappear from the nation's maps. Though many avoided the area. It didn't stop settlers from heading west, the Homestead Act of 1862 promised cheap land to those willing to colonize it. And just a dollar, 25 per acre men and women packed up everything they had and moved west. Farmers were soon raking in money from their cornfields.

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Ranchers razed large herds of cattle before long relatives back east headed out to join them. Life was good. But the rain didn't stay, and without it, vegetation became scarce, no rain meant dead crops and starving livestock. These new settlers may have learned how to work with the normal weather patterns, but they didn't know about a weather event called El Nino. And so, like generations of people the world over, they went for a different approach. The idea that two observed events were related regardless of the logistics.

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Simply put, for them, correlation was causation. While they didn't believe deser, which is where the cause of droughts, they did believe in remedies that didn't, if you'll pardon the pun, hold water. Early settlers had conquered the land, so now it was time to conquer the skies and all they had to do, according to scholars, both ancient and modern, was shaped, the rain loose from the clouds. One such scholar was the Greek philosopher Plutarch, who once noted that soon after great battles, the rains came.

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He was uncertain whether some divine power sent the rains to wash the blood from the earth or at the steaming blood itself caused condensed air. For a while, people believed him.

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Surely, Plutarch's Writings explained the storms that hindered the Spanish Armada and caused the Waterloo that contributed to Napoleon's downfall. Oddly enough, Napoleon himself disagreed with Plutarch. Instead, he believed it was ammunition that led to rainfall. In 1831, the French fired thousands of shots into the sky, hoping to release rain from the clouds, referring to it as the percussion method. And French winery claimed to have some success using it. Many people assumed that if it could work in the vineyards of France, it would work on the dry plains in the American Southwest.

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Drought ridden farmers were willing to try anything. After all, what did they have to lose? Even Lewis and Clark believed in the percussion method. History was chock full of battles taking place during the reign. Lewis once wrote had even witnessed rain falling after heavy artillery blasts during the Civil War. For Lewis, these concurrences simply added up to fact in an article appearing in the American Journal of Science and Arts in 1861, he stated The discharge of heavy artillery at contiguous points produces such a concussion that the vapor collects and falls generally in unusual quantities.

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The same day or the day following, there had been recent data to back the theory up to one. Eduard Powers, an engineer in Chicago, had interviewed thousands of civil war. Soldiers from both sides had documented hundreds of battles that had been fought in the rain, proving that gunfire either by concussion or percussion, brought on the precipitation that day, or at least within two days. But battles were the only way to bring down rain, and Mother Nature had built-In protection, powers claimed.

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And he stated so in his book titled War and the Weather, he wrote that burning large swaths of forest would also bring down fire quenching rains. Fortunately, the U.S. government didn't agree with his theory when he proposed that they burned down forests to induce rain. But while Powers, Lewis Clark and others passed off correlation as scientific proof, meteorologists themselves weren't buying it. The South was the wettest part of the country, and with or without battles, rain fell often.

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Powers was an engineer, Lewis and Clark were explorers and soldiers, none of them understood science as it pertained to meteorology. But desperate times often lead people to believe in things that normally don't make sense. And if the scientists who studied weather couldn't make it rain, that turned to people who promised they could enter. Charles Benjamin Farwell, a U.S. senator with the Texas ranch. In 1890, he pushed a bill approving a 9000 dollar budget on rainmaking efforts using the concussion method.

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On the day of the experiment, no one checked with the meteorologists or bothered with the weather report, no newspaper reporters were there to witness the test, though they were quick to publish the results afterward. According to The Washington Post, after setting off an explosion, torrential rain fell for nearly 20 minutes. The New York Post reported that the explosion caused rain to fall for six hours over a thousand square miles, about 2500 square kilometers. Farwell had been the only one overseeing the project, and on his word alone, the experiment was passed off as credible scientific fact.

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The following year, Congress once again ignoring scientists, approved an additional ten thousand dollars for more experiments involving the concussion method, governments in parched places like Nebraska and Kansas attempted to blast rain from the skies using tons of dynamite. The experiments didn't produce much in the way of rain. Officials reported great success to the newspapers between notable historic figures, politicians and the press. The stage had been set for charlatans to take advantage of the public, and one in particular had been paying very close attention.

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His wiry five foot nine frame didn't do much to command anyone's attention. His hair could be as unruly as the weather, and he frequently swept the curl from his forehead. His voice was soft enough that others often assumed he was shy or awkward or both. Other times, though, when someone got him talking about the weather, his excitement caused his striking blue eyes to light up and his words to flow with hurried confidence spewing technical jargon and data that few could keep up with.

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That didn't stop them from hanging on his every word, though, from farmers to politicians. People loved him, and his fan base stretched across four continents. But he wasn't a movie star and it wasn't his looks that drew people, though the smile he presented so often was infectious. If asked, people would say Charlie Hatfield's greatest assets were his enthusiasm and charisma. Magazines and newspapers wrote extensive articles about him, his quiet confidence and exploits were the subject of political and scientific debate.

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He wasn't the only one in his field, but he was certainly the best. After all, he'd been practicing his art since he was a boy on his parents ranch.

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You see, Hatfield was a rainmaker, and either he truly knew how to make it rain or he knew how to convince people that he did. He had what others in his profession did not because on top of all that charisma and self assuredness, Hatfield was also quite knowledgeable when it came to the weather. It had started out as a side hustle, had made a reputation among the local Southern Californian ranchers for bringing in much needed rainfall. But it wasn't until 1984, at the age of 40, that he was able to leave behind his job as a sewing machine salesman to make a small fortune as a rainmaker.

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And all of it started with a bet. That year, 19 for the city of Los Angeles was suffering through an extreme drought that had begun years earlier, Hatfield traveled to the city with an offer he would make it rain, just like he had for the ranchers farther south. Hatfield was clear that he didn't have luck on his side. He had knowledge. He understood a lot about the climate, including something known today as the El Nino Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, a complex system of weather patterns rotating between warm and cool ocean currents that causes a shift in the atmosphere.

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This process, along with strong trade winds, impacts whether on a global scale. And when Hatfield made the bet with city leaders, he had warm weather, El Nino on his side, along with a mountain of weather bureau reports. And the regular rainfall rarely exceeds eight or 10 inches, he told city officials. I cannot make it rain. I simply attract clouds and they do the rest. There must be some moisture in the air for me to work with had city officials understood.

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And so they have known that the average rainfall was 15 inches in an El Nino year. Instead, all they knew was the city had experienced a severe drought and they needed to do something. They put their trust in Hatfill because he didn't offer them potions and promises. No, he offered them what other charlatans had not scientific data and a special blend of 23 chemicals he claimed could literally milk the clouds of rain. Being a salesperson, Hatfield also understood marketing and making a happy customer.

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He was more than willing to back up his claims, so he made the city a bet. They couldn't turn down, give him five months to produce 18 inches of rainfall. If he could uphold his end of the deal, they'd pay him a thousand dollars. And if you're wondering that somewhere around 20000 today, not a bad paycheck. And when it was over, the results spoke for themselves. Hatfield had exceeded all their expectations and the city happily paid up.

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Instantly, Charlie the Rainmaker became front page news by 1950, Hatfield had 17 contracts under his belt from Texas to Alaska and places in between. His photo appeared in papers and magazines as far away as Cape Town, South Africa and London, England. They had nicknames for him to the cloud. Campello, God of Plenty, first lieutenant to Jupiter and Professor Hatfield. While other rainmaker's had long given up the trade and their snake oils, Hatfield was thriving as demand for his services increased.

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So to did his fees upwards of four thousand dollars for four inches of rain in some instances. And the thing is, it rained every time. Well, maybe not exactly on a particular day, but Attfield kept his word and met his deadlines, often exceeding them. To some, it seemed Hatfield could sweet talk Mother Nature into whatever he wanted. When the city of San Diego suffered a significant drought in 1915, Hatfield happened to be in town. So he offered his services and like the other jobs had been hired to do in the past, the city felt they had nothing to lose.

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After all, they would only pay if it rained and the city officials were desperate.

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The marina reservoir was barely at one third capacity and the demand on the water supply was growing with the ever increasing population.

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When Hatfield gave them his enthusiastic data laden pitch, every city leader was on board. Well, all but one, that is one official named Herbert Fay called the whole thing foolish. He was outvoted, though, and Hatfield got the job. The New Year had barely been rung in. When Hatfield set to work in January of 1916, he built a 20 foot tower 60 miles deep in the woods. Once had finished, he climbed the tower and poured his special chemical brew into iron pans and set the concoction on fire.

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Those curious enough to follow Hatfield, reported that the smell was bad, like the fumes from a Limburger cheese factory had been let loose. Hatfield climbed the tower and repeated the process every few hours, and the rain had promised showed up within days, making good on his word to bring in enough rain to fill the Morena reservoir.

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True to his reputation, Charles Hatfield had exceeded their expectations. The trouble was San Diego had no idea just how devastating that would be. The rains came lightly at first, then increased steadily over the next two weeks, elated people cheered. Newspapers posted the good news rainmaker Hatfield induces clouds to open. By January 15th, though, rains of biblical proportions deluged the city. In the mountains on the outskirts of San Diego, 17 inches of rain pummeled the landscape, causing landslides.

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The downpour quickly overwhelmed the San Diego River to the resulting floods, swept away everything in their path telephone lines, roads, homes, the entire community of little lenders'. Now, the rains weren't just hitting San Diego, the entire coastline experienced similar rainfall and flooding. While some speculated that Hatfield couldn't have affected the weather that far up coast, others offered a different take. One man who had to be rescued by rowboat told first responders, let's pay Hatfield ten thousand dollars to quit.

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The comment didn't faze Hatfield, though, the San Diego union printed his response a day later. In the next few days, I expect to make it really rain. Clearly, Hatfield had to be joking. San Diego no longer needed rain. In fact, it was imperative that it stop. Yet when officials pressed his blue eyes shown with that trademark enthusiasm, never more serious in my life, he said, Just hold your horses and I'll show you a real rain and rain.

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It did, I suppose Hatfield was lucky not to be born a German woman in the fourteen hundreds, if he had the following events, would surely have gotten him hanged for witchcraft. The rainfall already at record levels kept increasing valley windmill's resembled waterwheels, gas supplies couldn't be delivered. The Santa Fe train station ground to a halt and telephone lines were swept away, cutting off communications. If all that wasn't bad enough, there was about to be more bad news, the lower ļoti damn soon gave way.

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One worker who had watched it break open raced to warn the local ranchers nearby before he could throw a wall of water 40 feet tall, crashed into the valley. He scrambled to climb a tree, but the rushing water swept him from one tree to another before the trees also broke loose. After dumping over 30 inches of rain, the storm finally ended. That Jan became the wettest month on record and the damage was catastrophic, with a death toll of 50 human lives.

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Martial law prevailed in the valleys and the U.S. Marines were brought in with orders to shoot looters on sight. Naval ships were required to ferry people and supplies back and forth from the city. Thankfully, the marina reservoir held, but barely. Soon enough, residents began calling the disaster Hatfield's flood, despite the destruction, though, Charley seemed pleased and now the rains had ended. He set out on foot for a 60 mile hike to collect his pay. After all, hit upheld his end of the bargain, and now it was time for the city to do the same.

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As you might imagine, he ran into a problem with that the city officials had hired him, that much was true that had an agreement, but only a verbal one. And although Hatfield had made good on his word, the city now faced lawsuits, lots of them. The plaintiffs argued that Hatfield had acted on the city's behalf and that he had caused the disaster, not Mother Nature, if the city paid Hatfield for his services, they claimed they would be taking responsibility for all those losses.

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When Hatfield objected, the city officials pointed out the contract had never been signed, making it void. They also wanted Hatfield to prove the rains weren't an act of God and that he alone had caused the rain. They did, however, offer to pay the ten thousand dollars if Hatfield accepted responsibility for the damage. I'm sure it's no surprise that Charles refused their offer. Angry and upset, he sued the city of San Diego. It would take 22 years, but the case would eventually find its way into court where it was quickly dismissed.

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Charles Hatfield was never paid a single dime for his efforts there. And you'd think after those catastrophic results, other cities would refuse to hire him, but hire him. They did. From 1916 through the 1930s, Hatfield found plenty of employment, both locally and internationally, and the press continued to report on his successes. Cuba and Honduras contracted him to douse forest fires that were threatening valuable banana crops. The New York Times wrote about his trip to Italy, where it was said, Hatfield explained his secrets to the pope so that the pontiff could induce reign over Vatican gardens.

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Alberta, Canada, contracted him for five inches of rainfall. Hatfield built a tower bigger and taller than he'd ever done before, drawing not only hordes of spectators but a movie crew to document the event he put on a show, too often climbing the tower eight times a day to cook his chemical concoction. Eventually, the rains came five inches of rainfall, to be exact. Delighted Alberta paid Hatfield handsomely for his help. Afterwards, scientists and other observers pointed out that Alberta typically received six inches of rainfall yearly, on average, not five.

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Alberta had just paid Hatfield the biggest check of his career, all for an inch less of rain than normal. The era of the rainmaker couldn't last forever, though civil engineers designed dams, and that meant better water management. During the 1930s Dust Bowl era, Hatfield fans were unsuccessful in persuading President Franklin Roosevelt to send the rainmaker to the hard hit plains. Even when the city of San Diego suffered another dry spell, they quickly refused Hatfield services, although they did briefly consider hiring a different rainmaker.

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With his best days as rainmaker behind him, Charles Hatfield slipped from the public eye without contracts. He was forced to return to his previous line of work as a sewing machine salesperson. Not long after that, his wife divorced him. No one heard from Charles Hatfield for years until 1956, when Hollywood made a film based loosely on his life. It starred Burt Lancaster in the leading role alongside Katharine Hepburn. It was nominated for three Golden Globes. Two years after the film's release, the city of San Diego tried to contact Hatfield for a documentary on the flood that had hit the city years before.

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But Hatfield didn't answer. He couldn't. You see, four months earlier, in January of 1958, he had quietly died alone and his home in Pearblossom, California, at the age of 82. That may, after learning about his death, journalists put him in the papers once more. The headline for The Washington Post read Charles Hatfield, The Rainmaker Dies in obscurity, no reporters or die hard fans were present on the day Charles Hatfield was laid to rest at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale.

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In fact, in an ironic twist of fate, the man who had made a career out of filling the sky with everything the city needed to beat the heat failed to take advantage of its final audience. There wasn't a cloud in the sky. There's more to this story. Stick around after this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. Curious, Orville Wright walked to the window of his office and McCook Field, the airfield operated by the United States Army Air Service, was home to aviation experimentation.

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He knew the sound of every plane except the one he had just heard. So he glanced out the window, which gave him a clear sight line of the thousand foot runway, the hangars and all the engineering labs. He'd seen a lot of planes over the years, each designed for different purposes. Many of those projects had begun right on this particular airstrip to agricultural researchers had come up with a way to drop insecticide directly onto crops from low flying planes and things to aviation.

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Meteorologists could now take their instruments up into the clouds. And it was this sort of plane that caught his attention that warm summer day in 1922. His brother Wilbur had been gone nearly 10 years. But if he'd been there that day, he would certainly have been as amazed as Orville. Older now, with his signature mustache, graying and trimmed of its gravity defying curls, Orville stared out the window at the wonder in the sky. The plane, a French built hair, disappeared into one of the many clouds dotting the sky.

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When it reemerged, a long tail of smoke trailed behind it. No, he thought, not smoke. The plume was some sort of dust. The plane circled and disappeared into the cloud once more. All told, he watched it make six passes through the cloud before banking and vanishing into another dense cloud to the left of the first.

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And with each pass through, the clouds began to fade. By the time the little plane had moved on to the third and fourth, the first cloud had vanished. Orville Wright, the man who had made aviation history with his brother Kittyhawk, had just witnessed America's first attempt to control the weather by plane. The men behind the experiment where businessman Luke Francis Warren and a Cornell University chemist named Wilbur Bancroft, Warren and Wright had a lot in common. Both were entrepreneurs and both were fascinated with inventing Wright long since sold his airplane business for the tidy sum of one and a half million dollars and dedicated his life to inventing things rather than running a business.

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Warren wasn't as wealthy as Wright, but money was certainly on his mind. You see, Warren aspired to cash in on heading up the first company to manufacture rain. His scientists knew a thin film surrounded negatively and positively charged droplets of water inside clouds, a one that prevented the tiny droplets from collecting into larger ones, which formed rain. But they had a theory that if they dusted the clouds with electrified sand, they could induce rain and airplanes made the whole thing possible.

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Bancroft and Warren convinced the U.S. Army Air Service to provide not just funding but essential pilots and planes to the pilots would fly into cumulus clouds and eject the sand through a special chute. Although the trials didn't produce a single drop of rain, one Navy commander marvel that the disappearing clouds and wondered if the U.S. Navy bureau should buy the technology from Warren and Bancroft. But after 10 years of fruitless trials, everyone associated with the project lost faith, and its funding stopped.

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That didn't mean people stopped trying, though.

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Wartime in the 1940s ramped up a different need for controlling the weather, the allies faced danger from electrical storms that could knock out radio communications, as well as blizzards, hail and torrential rains. Soon, the War Department set up shop at the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire. A scientist working on a hot July day stashed dry ice in a cloud chamber and then watched as crystals formed millions of them after experimenting. He learned that even the tiniest speck of dust would cause the same results.

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All the droplets really needed, it seems, were nuclei to cling to. The result, depending on the temperature, was either snowflakes or raindrops. The Times loved the news, reporting that a piece of dry ice the size of a pea would be able to make millions of tons of snow. To test it, the war department sent a plane into a cloud over Mount Greylock on November 13th of nineteen forty six.

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Once inside the cloud, the plane unloaded six pounds of ice pellets, within seconds, the cloud erupted with ice crystals and snow fell from the skies over a three mile path. Requests, mostly well intentioned, flooded the scientists, a search and rescue teams thought clearing away clouds could aid them in their work. The Kansas State Chamber of Commerce wanted to use the technology to end droughts, and Hollywood wanted in on the technology to believing they could use it to create weather on a film set.

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There was another use, though. The military manipulating the weather could become a weapon as powerful as any atomic bomb just without the radioactive aftermath. Dumping snow on airstrips or causing mudslides near a target would certainly hinder the enemy. Even today, the U.S. Air Force still keeps tabs on emerging technologies in regards to using the weather to wage war. And naturally, its uses spread to the civilian side of life. As recently as 2008, Beijing wanted to manipulate the weather to provide the best possible conditions for the Olympics, and in Florida, one company created a powder that turns into a gel and bragged that their product had the ability to weaken a hurricane.

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But the most prominent use of weather altering technology before the U.N. prohibited it, that is would have to be during the Vietnam War between 1967 and 1972, the Air Weather Service used the technology to seed clouds in an effort to reduce traffic along the Ho Chi Minh trail. The project was a secret to most Americans, and many who did know about it questioned it for being so unusual. But supporters were quick to point out how much more humane a bit of rainfall was compared with deadly chemicals like napalm.

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All of which was summed up nicely in the unofficial motto that people in the program were known to proclaim make mud, they'd say not war. American Chateaux is hosted by Lauren Vogel Bomb. This episode was written by Michelle Muto with researcher Robin Miniter and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Trevor Young with executive producers Aaron Manque, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick. To learn more about the show, visit Greyman, Millicom for more podcast from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.