Bittersweet Infamy - #53 - Make It Rain

Episode Date: September 18, 2022

Josie tells Taylor about American "rainmaker" Charles Hatfield and the San Diego flood of 1916. Plus: vuvuzelas, SunChips bags, and other things that are simply too loud.

Welcome to Bitter Sweden for me, I'm Taylor Basso, I'm Josie Mitchell, on this podcast where we tell the stories that live on in envy, shocking, the unbelievable, and the unforgettable. Truth may be bitter, but the stories are always sweet. You know how there's eagle-eyed, like eagle-eyed is, you can, you can see things in my life? What is the, uh, the hearing equivalent of that? Sharp-eared? Sharp-eared.

Okay, good. I don't think that's a real thing. No, but I was going to say like bat-eared and that can't possibly be like a compliment. Yeah, echolocation. I don't know, yeah. Those of our listeners who are well-versed in the art of echolocation may have noticed that the sound in the podcast is a little bit different, uh, specifically, we realized after like two years of doing this that if you want to get real technical, our, uh, our

loudness normalization was too quiet. Yeah, we Googled it. And we Googled it. Which I thought we were already doing the right thing. I know, I thought we had, I think we did Google it and then we just Googled it again. See, that's the thing, you gotta Google again. Yeah. Every, every year you gotta Google.

You gotta Google twice. Yeah. They change it all the time on you. So basically, uh, if you've noticed that our, and I thought that it was our, um, our, our podcast host had maybe put some sort of dampener on it, but no, I finally did some looking into it. It was, it was us being ignorant as always. So now, you know, we're gonna, we're, we're past those minus 24 lefts days or into our

minus 16 lefts era. If you're breaking down the podcast by eras, that's a really good way to do it. Forget seasons, forget, forget round numbers. Let's talk about when we switched lefts, baby. He's lefts, baby. Um, I don't know what lefts is. No, I'm just thinking like German airplanes. We didn't have enough.

We just didn't have enough. I find myself wondering as I, as I make my edits, is this too loud? Like am I, am I, am I leaving this too loud now? Like is this, cause I'm used to it being harder. And so in honor of our switch from minus 24 lefts to minus 16 lefts, because you've got to, you've got to make these celebrations where you find them. I have made a infamous, uh, themed around things that are simply too loud. My laugh.

Is that the first one? My, my laugh as well. I'm not going to stop laughing. So what is the loudest sound in recorded history? That's got to be the first thing that we're thinking about, right? Like, let's just go right to the jugular as we say. What is the loudest thing ever? Um.

Yeah. What's your shot? I think it's like a, like a, uh, like a volcanic eruption, like a boom, or it's a boom. Exactly right. Is it a boom? It's a volcanic eruption. Holy shit. Look at me.

Listen to me. You got it. Look at you. You're getting better. You are getting better at these games. The, uh, Indonesian Isle of Krakatoa erupted on August 27th, 1883. Krakatoa. That feels right.

Crack. Yeah. Atoa. Yeah. Yeah. You got it. It hurts to stub your toe and you scream very loudly, hence Krakatoa. If you were screaming as loudly as the eruption of Krakatoa, you would be clocking in at 310

decibels. Okay. What does that mean? By the way, I should also say that this eruption also, in addition to being loud, it destroyed two thirds of this island and killed 30,000 people. So it's more than just a piece of trivia, right? It's a very serious geologic catastrophe. The info that I'm giving you comes from an article by Maddie Shaw Roberts at classicfm.com

and Maddie has very helpfully included an infographic for people like you and me, Josie, who are wondering like, what does that mean? So we can share with our listeners on a podcast this infographic. Yes. It's a great system and it works flawlessly, but it basically gives the decibel levels of different common noises. So the threshold for pain. So if you are hearing noise, your threshold for pain is typically about 120 to 140 decibels.

I saw different estimations, but 120 to 140. Okay. At about 150 to 160, we're talking rupturing eardrums. For those who need a quick primer on how sound works, you didn't see Magic School Bus Season One Episode Eight, Magic School Bus and the Haunted House, with guest star Carol Channing. A fine episode. Basically the way sound works is noise is a series of vibrations. Vibrations hit your eardrum with a certain amount of pressure that dictate to you what

that thing sounds like, but if something is louder, the vibrations have more pressure, more force. And if you get like real, real, real loud, this noise can potentially kill you because it'll like damage your internal organs. Gotcha. Okay. It's not good. Harrison, fireworks are about 140 decibels, a jet engine is about 130, a police sirens

about 120, which is, this is kind of getting into threshold of pain if you're standing next to this thing when it makes noise. The Krakatoa eruption was 310 decibels. Holy shit, okay, yeah, so just double that bad boy, ouch, oh, ouch. The Krakatoa eruption sent shockwaves around the world and unleashed tsunamis in the Indian Ocean. People nearly 4,800 kilometers or 3,000 miles away reported hearing sounds like cannon fire. Oh dude.

More than 30,000 were killed and 20 million tons of sulfur were emitted in the air, lowering global temperatures for years. Oh, sulfur, oof. Okay. At 310 decibels, the event was so loud that if you were nearby and the catastrophic events of the eruption itself didn't kill you, which they certainly would, then the noise itself was loud enough to potentially kill you. Yeah, rupture, eardrums and damaged internal organs.

That is not the way to go. No, it's not a great way to go. I mean, we've talked about it on the podcast before, death by volcano under any circumstances, not. Not ideal. Shop around. Wow. Krakatoa got some competition on January 14th, 2022, when the island of Hungatonga,

Haapai, which was near Tonga in the South Pacific, note that past tense was, was destroyed by a volcanic explosion producing a sonic boom that was heard 6,000 miles away in Alaska. It is believed to be the less infamous second loudest sound in recorded history. Wow. Yeah. I hope Krakatoa keeps it number one. That'd be cool. Yeah, we don't need to, we don't need to challenge that record, I agree.

Speaking of loud noises that got recorded, if you were a soccer fan during the 2010 World Cup, or even if you weren't, you may remember the intoxicating call of the vuzela, long plastic horn, you, you see, you remember, you're, you, you remember back in the day. Idea. It's a long plastic horn. It's basically like a cheap kind of plastic injection molded horn that dominated the soundscape of South African football. And this is the clip that I've come with just to remind you what a stadium of vuzelas

at full passion could sound like. Full passion. Another setting on our audacity editing. Full passion, please. There we go. Oh my gosh. Isn't it beautiful? It's like a terrifying swarm of flying, not bees, because bees are too small, like something

bigger. Hornet, murder hornet. Yeah, exactly. That is. So that's that. Have they been outlawed in stadiums? Oh, fuck yeah. Absolutely.

Okay. Like, absolutely. Because I don't know how professional players play or work with all that sound anyway, but like, ooh, that sound. Damn. They hated it. Oh, everybody, the players, broadcasters, tell anyone watching on TV, international fans who like weren't familiar with the custom of the blowing of this horn and then came

out to, you know, World Cup South Africa and we're in for quite a surprise. It has a sound level of about 120 decibels, which is again, this is around the threshold of pain. And this is if you're one meter from the horn. So like, say there's someone blowing a horn a meter behind your head, which is very likely, let alone a fucking stadium full of people doing it at the same time. Damn. Oh god.

Oh god. That is rough. It was described by South African journalist John Quilane as an instrument from hell. People including Quilane argued for its banning, but because it was seen as part of this quintessentially South African football experience, many were very sensitive about any interference, especially from a European body like FIFA. And so it stayed despite its wide unpopularity. Oh, that's fair.

I get that reasoning. But then at the end of the day, you have this very loud, potentially painful sound that you're forced to hear. One person who makes a claim at inventing the controversial noise maker is a guy named Freddie Macke, who says, quote, many people say they don't like the noise, but I've been blowing the Vuvuzela for decades now, and I've never heard of anyone going to hospital or dying because of it, which I love. No one's dead.

Listen, listen. I've never heard of anyone going to the ER. So is it that bad? He can say. I don't know how he invented it. He said, I have been dedicated to popularizing the Vuvuzela since 1965 when I was 10. My brother bought me a bicycle to ride to school on. It had a big aluminium hooter with a rubber bulb on the end.

Those are called Hooters? Big Hooter. Okay. They are now forever and always. I realized if I took off the ball and blew into the horn, it made a more exciting noise. I used to take it along to local football matches, played on gravel or in the street, and play it to encourage my team. He says that the device was previously called a lemparoro, as well as a boogie blast, before

he settled on the Vuvuzela branding in 1992 to celebrate the release of Nelson Mandela and the readmittance of South Africa to international football. Okay. Yeah. He says Vuvuzela in Zulu means a combination of welcome, unite and celebration. Well, that's lovely, but that's not the sound. No, the sound is. Yeah.

The sound is you will be stung to death. It will be my girl and you will be McCulloch calling you will die. Like it's just very alarming sound. I do not like it. Wow. What a pot. Jesus. Macaulay.

Let him live. I'm just saying. I saw that movie maybe a little too young. No, that's no. You're right. Exed in there. You know what? You're not wrong.

You didn't say anything that was factually inaccurate. So I mean, I love the spirit of that. I feel like we'll never get another Vuvuzela because of social media. Like kids aren't bored. They're not going to take the bulb off the off the hooter. You think that the kids are they're making the Vuvuzela app rather than taking the bulb off the hooter. Yes.

Is your thing. This is our civilization's downfall. Yes. The extinction of hooters. I agree. Well, of tactile hooters. There's only app hooters from now on. The the invention Macaulay says the invention has not made him rich.

Big companies knocked him off. So the ones that you saw at the World Cup were made by another company and you make any money off it. Oh. But he says he's not bitter. He gives me great joy to know that I created an instrument that has been played by everyone from tiny children to Nelson Mandela. When I do pass away, I want people to blow Vuvuzela's at my funeral.

You couldn't say that with a straight face. I did. I actually did. If you roll the tape back. I could hear you. I actually did get it out. Crack it. That crack.

Weevils wobble that they don't fall down, baby. I'm sorry. Krakatoa there. Don't worry. Oh, not the Krakatoa. No. I love. I love the sentiment of it.

Yes. Semi colon. The sonic image of it is very dearly beloved. That's pretty. Yeah. It's a pretty decent way to go. Actually, now that I've now that I've sounded it out, why not? Sounded it out.

Surely. Yes. As for talk of a ban, he said in 2010, that will never happen while I'm still alive. No government will stop it. The Vuvuzela is my baby, and I'd happily go to jail for it. Whoa. That's a passion. That's that passion.

He has his passion setting. Yes. Plus 24. Yeah. Maki. Nicely done. Yeah. Unfortunately for poor Freddie, his activism wasn't enough.

The Vuvuzela has been banned at subsequent world cups, as well as many major sporting events. Cricket Grounds, the 2012 Olympics, Yankee Stadium, UFC, NFL, the Little League World Series, the Rugby World Cup, Wimbledon, the 2010 Baltimore Anime Convention, Otacon, et cetera, et cetera. What? Otacon? Oh, no. Yes. They were apparently, if you got caught using a Vuvuzela at Otacon, that like lights out

you were done. Get out. Oh, shit. The Vuvuzela has also been banned at the Wisconsin State Capitol since its use in a protest against Governor Scott Walker. Okay. Wow. 2010 was a banner year for things that were too loud, just simply, simply too loud.

The same year also gave us an unlikely PR kerfuffle when a food company is a well-intentioned attempt to make its packaging better for the environment, ended up being significantly worse for consumers' ear drums. Josie, do you remember that really loud sunship spag? No. No, not at all. I thought for sure. You seem like a sunship girl.

I thought for sure this would be on your radar. I love me a sunship, but I know this did not, this did not hit. Oh, wow. In the late 2000s, PepsiCo had perfected a chip bag technology that was 100% compostable within three months. Whoa. So this is like actually a very, for as much as I'm about to bust on this insanely loud chip bag, this is actually like an insane piece of science that they pulled off here,

and I do want to give them gudos for that. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, it's, do you know what it was made of? Corn. Yep. Yeah, baby. Got it.

It was polylactic acid, a corn-based biopolymer. Yeah, girl. Get it. They, I'm in many trumpets, they unveiled their new eco-friendly packaging using their sunships brand, a fine choice because hippies eat sunships, which is, I guess, why I figured you probably ate them. I believe it was last episode, two episodes ago, you're like, fuck hippies, hey, them. So cool.

Thanks. I didn't say that. I just cosigned somebody else saying it. Moving forward. Chip bag. Let's go. This is a little video purported to show the bag crackling at over 95 decibels compared to a Tostitos bag, which crackled at about 77 decibels.

Holy shit, that's loud. That's a loud bag. Yeah. Let's get back into comparing sounds to other sounds. OSHA requires you to wear hearing protection at 90 decibels, so about five decibels less than this, and it's about, that 90 decibels is about the amount of noise a hairdryer makes next to your ear. Holy shit.

This is a chip bag? Yeah, it's a very loud chip bag. An Air Force pilot told the Wall Street Journal that they were louder than the cockpit of his jet. Consumers reported that they were unable to hold conversations while eating chips. And as in all infamous stories from this era, we have protests via the medium of snidely named Facebook group, you know, the classic. The all caps, sorry, but I can't hear you over this sunship's bag notched about 49,000

members at its recorded peak. That is how, like, I guess it just missed all the testing, like how did that not get picked up? Now, I think this whole thing is seen as more laudable and progressive, and I don't know. The idea of such a big mega-hyper-global corp as Pepsi actually seeming to do something earnestly good for the environment and then, like, making good on it, they seem to have thought that that would carry them through, but people, especially in 2010, now I think that I was going to say there might be more of a conversation to be had if you could hear

it over the bag. But in 2010, it was seen as this ridiculous thing that, like, that's what people were saying then. They were like, what, you didn't fucking, you never opened one of these bad boys? Come on. Eventually, the company dealt with the problem by mailing out earplugs to affected customers. And outfitting shelves, selling the product with stickers that read, yes, the bag is loud. That's what change sounds like.

That's good. They did good. That was good. That's pretty good. But it wasn't because, eventually, amid persistent consumer feedback, they were forced to go back to the drawing board, says Gregory Unra in the sweet spot of sustainability strategy in the fall 2013 issue of MIT Sloan Management Reviews. This is analyzing it from, like, a strategic perspective, quote, because they had publicly

committed to producing sun chips in a 100% compostable bag, PepsiCo recognized that going back to the old packaging was not an option. Despite some internal tensions, PepsiCo R&D teams persisted and ultimately produced a quieter bag design that was still biodegradable. The new packages hit shelves in 2011 to a far better response. So it kind of worked it out. I gather that they ended up shifting a lot of their R&D around this into supply chain stuff after this.

So I think they were a little bit stung by how it all went and that they were kind of, I don't know, ridiculed for their very well-intentioned but incredibly loud chip bag. And on that note, if you find this podcast too loud or you want to get in touch for any other reason, please feel free to email us at bittersweetinfamy at gmail.com or follow us at bittersweetinfamy on Instagram. That was loud, dude. That was really loud. It was from the heart, but also from the throat.

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Conditions apply. I'm going to do a little homegrown history this time around here. Okay. Because we are diving into the San Diego archive. Okay. And we're going to search out a very contentious element of Southern California history. It's not drugs. It's not Hollywood.

It's just plain old water. You've seen Chinatown, right? Did you believe I haven't? But I do know that Chinatown is very famously about water Shenandigas. Shenandaguas. Shenandaguas. That was good. That was tight.

Thank you. Yeah. Because water isn't just water in Southern California. Water, it might as well be gold. Taylor, this is the story of a rainmaker. A scientist of sorts. No, I'm saying it right. His name was Charles Hatfield.

He came to San Diego City Council in 1915 and said, don't worry about this drought, because I can fill your reservoir. I can make the clouds pour for $10,000. It's always a catch. Into a mere month of Hatfield's rainmaking experiments, the heavens opened. And Lake Morina reservoir dam overflowed, blasting out downstream dams, washing out canyons and rivers, flooding a utopian commune that took up residence in the Tijuana River Valley. It overturned railroad tracks.

It completely cut off San Diego from any communication or delivery lines for at least a month. It killed an estimated 50 people and caused over $3.5 million worth of damage. It's one of these monkey paw situations. You'd be careful what you wish for. Exactly. And Hatfield certainly made it rain, but the city of San Diego never paid him. The argument, okay, so may I?

Oh, you may. He made it rain too much. He made it rain too much. Yeah. There was no stipulation. That's not... I don't know. I like Sharay Whitfield from Real Housewives of Atlanta.

I pay my vendors who deserve to get paid, but let's find out together. That's good. That's good. Okay. So, Charles Hatfield, Charles Mallory Hatfield, he was born a Kansan, but his family moved to Southern California early in his life. He was like eight years old. And he grew up between San Diego and Los Angeles counties in an area called Temecula.

His father was a sewing machine manufacturer and salesman and repairman, triple threat. Any and all dude with sewing machines. This was back in Kansas. So when they moved out west in 1890, Charles Hatfield's dad started with... He started with agriculture and farming, but then he quickly pivoted to real estate and buying up land because of the lack of water in Southern California. He just couldn't really make a steady, sustainable go with farming. Sewing machines were still very important to the Hatfield household though because Charlie

and his two brothers, Paul and Joel, each knew how to take apart a singer sewing machine and put it back together again. They were kind of like drilled by their dad on how to do this. Listen, when the apocalypse comes and people need to make new clothes. Amen. You know? Yeah. This is what I'm saying.

You need to be able to have that shit down in military precision. Exactly. And all this knowledge about sewing machines would prove helpful to Charlie. He's also known as Charlie because he began his career selling them door to door. So I know what you might be thinking. Tell me what I'm thinking. It's never right. Fair enough.

That's true. You're thinking this dude, door to door salesman, then turned rainmaker, asking for 10 grand, carlton, snake oil, huckster, running around, chucking sewing machines at people and then sprinting between droughts, flushing people out of their money. I think that's what you're thinking. You know? So you're thinking? I don't know that I had congealed the thought that much.

But now that you mention it, like it's not a bit, I would have gotten there eventually. You just beat me to the bunch. Okay. All right. But that's not the whole story. Oh no. There's more to it than just a traveling sewing machine salesman who made a flood. I don't even know what means he's using yet, but anyway, that killed 50 people.

There's more. So he was a salesman, but this image of him is kind of like the charlatan, snake oil. Tonic with cocaine in it. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The con man. The con man.

He doesn't really fit that bill completely. Many people who dealt with him claimed that he was very soft spoken and he wasn't very aggressive in his salesmanship. He came from Quaker blood. He always wore a simple pressed suit. He had these piercing steel blue eyes and very, very pale skin. This all sounds con artisty. An enigmatic man in a freshly pressed suit with piercing blue eyes.

Yeah. Okay. I like to use like he's like running around with like silver tipped cowboy boots and he's like, I'm going to solve this and you're going to buy it and everything will be fixed and fixed, fixed, fixed. But he doesn't really have the best crooks don't seem like crooks. Fair enough. That's true.

Okay. I mean, you've researched this. You know better than me. I'm just, my guard is still up. I need to be convinced. Okay. So he doesn't fit this bill of huckster con man, at least for that time. Many people comment and say that he, he doesn't give off that vibe.

He's much more soft spoken than that. So he started with sewing machine sales, but during this time he was also very interested in the science behind rain making. And he was particularly drawn to a text called elementary meteorology by William Morris Davis. Okay. Okay. A fine text. A fine text.

Davis was a professor of physical geography in Harvard college and the book came out in 1894. Okay. So Hatfield has had a few years studying it, pouring over it and he's pretty mesmerized by what he reads in there and he begins to have like a self-taught practice of initiating rain. Sure. I feel like we might need like a little context reminder.

This era, the 19, like early 1900s is known as the age of progress. So there's a lot that's happening in scientific fields that isn't necessarily regulated. Some of it is very snake oily, very con manny. Let me show you my teleportation device at the world's fair. Yes. Yes, exactly. But at the same time, there's lots of these self-taught white dudes out there getting things off the ground.

Literally, you can look at the Wright brothers who flew Kitty Hawk in 1903. They didn't have any type of certification or, you know, collegiate backing for air flight and yet up goes Kitty Hawk. I don't think they had certification yet for that, did they? No. It wasn't. It wasn't a thing. Because nobody had invented it yet.

Yes. Until Orville Redenbacher and his brother looked at birds and said, what if that but us? That's how it worked. Henry Ford at this time was tinkering with the first gas-powered car and it was in 1908 that the first Model T rolled off the conveyor belt. Yeah, a T for Taylor. Little known fact. So.

Because I'm cute. No one was conferring degrees or giving certification for these things. It was self-taught white dudes who were making these huge leaps in scientific discoveries. So people were willing to believe that, hey, we're in a situation where we need more water in this arid climate that's being more populated every day. It makes sense to maybe just get somebody who can make it rain. If those Wright brothers can fly, then why can't we make rain? Who's to say?

Yeah. Who's to say? And who's to say that 50 years from now, 100 years from now, like we'd be listening back in this podcast, being like, now we can't stop making it rain because our invention went haywire. But the technology is elementary, listen to these idiots from the past. You don't know it. I'm sorry, I led with the catastrophe there.

And then I gave context. You have to open it in media's rest. I got really caught up with the image of like 80-year-old Taylor, 83-year-old Taylor listening back to this podcast. I hadn't really thought. I would. Yeah. No, I totally see that.

With your little earbuds. It's cute. And I'll be like, damn, I'm glad they turned it up. They turned up the volume. Yeah, that's true, idiots. On the science of rain making at this time, there were a handful of methods that were in practice. This science slash pseudoscience, one of those early 1900 things, is called pluviculture.

These are pluviculturists who are working on the creation of rain. Yeah. Okay. So we've got a name. We've got a name. It must be real. We've got a name. It must be made up.

The name? Yes. But that's okay. So there's a few methods for creating rain at this time. One of them is to essentially bomb the skies because it's believed that an increase in particles in the air is what is responsible for making it rain. Okay. So there's a counts of pluviculturists just like shooting cannons and gunfire up into the

sky. I'm hoping that it'll. That it'll spring a leak. It might. Yeah. It might puncture that big old kiddie pool in the sky. Exactly. That theory is based on a Plutarch quotation about rains following great battles.

After great battles, there are always great rains, divulged rains. And they were like, they took it literally, they're like, you know, he's onto something. Yes. Yeah. It's not a cleansing thing or like you coming back to your center or you're wondering what's the meaning of life after great battle. It's just rain. Yeah.

You know what? I will say it's very easy for us to sit here in 2022 and shit talk these people because they don't know how water works, which is very sweet. I'm excited for when all my theories can be shit talked. That'll be fun from our from our like our swampy rainy future in 2083. This is what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't want to like be snarky at these people for like not understanding science with the benefit. Like I do think it is by doing things like shooting at the sky and then it not subsequently raining that we can be like, okay, well, we tested that hypothesis and we move forward. Yeah. It's the scientific method. Shooting it. God is the scientific method.

Yeah. At the same time that I snub my nose, I am also trying to be sympathetic to like, you know, these dudes are up in a plane and Henry Ford is rolling around in a car. Like that must have been fucking mind blowing. So sure, it must be hard to not have good ideas in a time where everyone else does. Do you know what I mean? That sincerely, it must be hard to like not know that I don't get it. Sounding horrible.

Yeah. It sounds so dickish. It must be hard to be a fucking idiot. That's what it sounds like. How did I how did I get here from starting my point with like the exact opposite? I don't know. No, I tried it too. It's a hellish circle.

I don't know, dude. I just don't know. Another method for making it rain. It was also believed that setting fires could cause rain. Again, kind of a particle theory situation. That was not true. No, that's a day. That's a hard lesson to learn to especially if you're like, yeah, damn, we really need

this drought to go away, light a fucking fire. That's tough. Yeah. Yeah. That was a that was a hard. I don't know about that one. But there is a method that Hatfield is most interested in, and it is the practice of sending up chemical compounds into the atmosphere and, you know, through the scientific method

trial and error, finding out how those can cause precipitation. So he experimented Charlie Hatfield himself. He experimented with various combinations of chemicals in these kind of shallow mixing pans. They were metal pans that were probably like nine inches deep and then maybe like two feet across square. So you know that that size pretty not not huge, but sizable, I suppose. No, in order to make entire Skyray, no, that's not big enough.

Oh, fair. Yes. Okay. Yes. If you were trying to make it rain inside your bathroom, yeah, maybe true, but no. The exact chemicals that Hatfield used are unknown to this day because he was very secretive secret about it all. He did not that that's a potential million dollar concoction, the Jillian dollar concoction,

right? Yes, exactly. He's not just going to be passing that around. Do you have any guesses as to what this concoction was made of? He used something like 23 chemicals in this concoction. So I 11 secret herbs and spices. So I am not familiar with all of them or it could even guess. You don't know every chemical I in the world don't even know what a chemical is to be honest.

If I had to define it right now, I'd be like, what is a chemical stinky is it like a bond? Oh, we're just going to embarrass ourselves. We're shitting on people who are like stupid idiot, you know what water is fucking dummy. I mean, when we're like what what am bleach? Where do bleach go? What am bleach? I would guess that one of the chemicals, which is like largely identified now as a source for cloud seeding would be like silver iodide, maybe even solid carbon dioxide, which is

essentially dry ice. That's what I was thinking. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say silver iodide and condensed carbon dioxide and 22 other chemicals that I could tell you, but I don't like it. Number 18 will shock you. Whatever you're thinking, I promise it's not.

That's one of those fucking lists where you have to scroll all the way down and hit see more. Yeah. Yeah. And then they'll just have like Adele is dead because I feel like Adele is dead. Adele is not dead. You never been on these websites where it'll just be like Melissa McCarthy lost 300 pounds and then the picture is like Ariana Grande and she's like, no, that's not what happened.

You're just lying. This is like such a barometer for when I am depressed, but I'm like, I think I better click that just to make sure. You click them. I need to make sure that Adele isn't dead. Okay. Let's get our shit together. So Hatfield, he's into these chemicals.

He's very secretive about it all and he's also secretive about the exact method of distribution of these chemicals into the atmosphere. So there are accounts of his experiments where eyewitnesses will say, well, there were big proofs of colored smoke wafting into the air or there were loud explosions happening close to where he was. Standard mad scientist shit. Yeah. But nothing is properly confirmed by, you know, a collaborating eyewitness account.

Besides the fact that Hatfield would construct these 20 foot towers that at the top would have almost like, like a widow's walk kind of thing, like a space where he could stand and can have these pans up and, you know, exposed to the air. Get the pans higher. Get the pans just 20 feet up and we'll see how that does. Yeah. My problem is that I'm only 5'9", if I can get up higher, now we got a gumbo going. Yeah.

Well, they also had to be by bodies of water. They'd be these clusters of like three to five, 20 foot towers by some type of lake or pond, something like that. So somewhere where it would naturally rain anyway. Exactly. Try this shit in the desert, you f- anyway. Well, see, that's the thing is that Hatfield is somewhat successful, but he never takes on cases that are in the deep desert.

Arizona, he ignores those. Anzabarago, no thank you. He's always in spaces that rainfall is limited, but there is still some rainfall. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So he starts mixing these chemicals on his father's ranch. And in one of these first iterations, a little bit of rainfall is .03 inches, baby.

Not bad. A victory. But he's also very clear. And I think this kind of maybe feeds into people's feelings that he was not a charlatan. He's very clear to distinguish that he is not a rainmaker. Okay. Instead, he refers to himself as a moisture accelerator. Oh, baby.

I can barely get that out. Me too. Moisture accelerator. No, sir. Yes. I am not a rainmaker. I'm a moisture accelerator. He's a technician.

This isn't a magic power. This is just a guy who knows what he's doing. This is a scientistian. This is a real-life scientistian doing scientifics. He can be quoted in multiple newspapers saying, I do not make rain. That would be an absurd claim. I simply attract clouds and they do the rest. Moisture accelerator.

Boom. Hmm. Yeah. You know, it makes a simplistic kind of anti-logic. Listen, I don't make rain. I just make clouds. Clouds rain. Yeah.

You know, like, you know what? Sure. Exactly. Why not? Why not? Yeah. That's kind of how I was coming to it. You get some steely blue eyes, Hatfields.

You're quiet. Yeah. Pressed little suit vest. Quaker blood. I think I'm in. Why would a Quaker lie to me about clouds? Yeah. He's pale as fuck.

He's always under a rain cloud. I get it. It's fine. Yeah. You don't look like you ever see the sun. You look like you attract clouds. And the man is from Southern California. Yes.

There we go. What a way to be. Sure. He experiments around in the area with some success here and there. Enough success that in 1904 he gets his first paying gig in the Los Angeles area when he is able to summon 18 inches of rainfall during December of 1904. How does one get a gig like that? Oh.

What app was he on? Bright. In the Hooters app? Like what was this? A moisture accelerator app. I guess. I don't know. Let me bring this jingle that was published in the Los Angeles Examiner shortly after

these 18 inches of Hatfield's rainfall. It's a jingle by EA Brinnistool called Mr. Hatfield. Just hold your breath and do not speak and we will give the name of this progressive scientist who's earned undying fame. His name is Hatfield. It's simply Hatfield, exclamation point. The only name that Californians speak. Oh Mr. Hatfield, here's to you Hatfield.

God bless you for that thankful heavenly leak. So that's fucked up. That's a thing people did back then. That had like powerful citizen pain vibes. Tragic. That's the beginning of a tragedy. Yeah. Yeah.

Do you think that this was something that was done out of the goodness of his own heart and his own love for Hatfield, or do you think that this is maybe something that Hatfield would put him up to maybe with a little bit of coin? Ooh. You know, I think Los Angeles was truly thankful and I think, I don't think Hatfield paid this off. No. I think Brinnistool came.

You have consistently, Josie, you're really putting your name behind this guy, this Hatfield. You're really saying he's the real deal. I'm not saying he's the real deal, but I'm... You're really saying he's 100%, you're saying he's legit on the level and he is making it real. Wow. I can't believe you're saying that. Wow, Josie, that's pretty irresponsible to just make claims to him.

I'm giving him a D minus. He still passes, but he doesn't pass very well. That's okay. You know what? We can get a shooter. That is okay. I mean, it drags down your GPA, but you still get the credit. So in these next 10 years, Hatfield is getting these contracts all over the country elsewhere

in Southern California, but also in Texas, in the Yukon. He gets hired by mine operators in Alaska. He has something like 17 contracts with commercial entities and they're typically farmers, ranchers, growers of some type. People will hire someone to feng shui their boardroom, right? If it's something that your competitors are doing and it seems to work and it rained as it will beside large bodies of water, that just kind of happens. So then we get to 1914.

The Panama Canal is completed. California as a state is getting super stoked for the increase in trade, the increase in money that is sure to come with all of the ships and trading that will be funneled up to the California coast. And then your continental canal can't eat it. San Francisco has on the books for a while, has been planning to do an exposition to showcase the rebuild of the city after the 1906 earthquake. Yes.

We're calling this exposition the Panama Pacific International Exposition. San Francisco has theirs slotted, they're stoked. San Diego on the other hand, a city with a much smaller population, not so much on the map, also has plans to host an exposition. The Panama California Exposition. Okay. San Francisco gets wind of this and they're like, is San Diego my dude? Packs you on the head, but we're kind of doing one and ours is like the international one.

So you may just want to fold up shop right now and let us do our thing. Wow. San Francisco, your humility. San Diego, the whole plan was to get San Diego on the map to pull tourism to the city to really get some first time attention to the city because there wasn't a lot that was happening. This is pre-Betty Broderick. Exactly. The eyes of the nation had not yet been locked upon this jewel.

Exactly. So San Diego says, oh, okay, yeah, yeah, no, we're going to do it anyway. We're going to go ahead and push forward with our expo and the two expos go on simultaneously. They both start in January of 1915. Even though it's much smaller, San Diego does put a whole bunch of time and effort into building the facilities to host the exposition and they build a urban park that is still standing today, Balboa Park. And it's absolutely gorgeous.

They have an organ pavilion and there's museums, there's restaurants, the world-famous San Diego Zoo is there. And it's all built for this 1915 exposition. San Francisco similarly builds a whole bunch of buildings. They're also beautiful. Some of them are standing, but various buildings have been destroyed in earthquakes. So San Diego actually wins out historically with the buildings, but also with the fact that after the expo, Roosevelt who came to visit was like, San Diego, you're the fucking

coolest. I'm going to give you a naval contract. Thanks so much for being so cool, which sparks the exponential growth of San Diego when the Navy takes root and there's a huge naval presence still there. The expo has such a success with nearly one million people visiting San Diego over the course of 1915 that city officials decide to extend the Panama Expo for a whole another year. Oh, wow.

San Diego's folds after its intended nine months, they do a wonderful job. It's great. It's fun. But San Diego is like, let's keep going. This is our moment. The party doesn't need to stop. I've got a guy's phone number. We can get more.

Also, it's not raining down here, so we can party as hard as we want until city officials get a little worried about the fact that it's not raining. Yeah. It's nice to have nice weather. This is getting a little drowdy over here. We need some drinking water. We need to maybe it would be dope and nice if we could somewhat fill this big old reservoir that we've spent millions of dollars revamping on the eastern edge of the San Diego watershed.

City officials are riding pretty high off of the Panama, California Expo. They've got this engineering feet out at Morena Lake, and they're like, you know what? If we can do the Expo, we can fill this goddamn reservoir. And we should because our population is going to be booming. People love San Diego. They start thinking about how can we alleviate this drought? What is the best route for us to do this? It's only holding a third of the capacity that it could.

There's a mover and shaker in San Diego at this time. His name is Fred Binney. He's a businessman. He's connected to a city council, mover, shaker, Esquire, you know what I mean? And he's not actually a lawyer, mover, shaker kind of thing. And he is an avid follower of all the rain making science that is happening around Southern California. And he has met Charlie Hatfield at this point.

Hatfield lives in San Diego County with his wife, who's also from San Diego. So he's a local boy. Fred Binney is like, hey, San Diego City Council, I got an idea. I know a scientist, verifiable, who can bring us rain and fill that reservoir. Hatfield shows up to San Diego City Council, and he pretty much proposes a few different scenarios in which he will bring rain. And I shouldn't say scenarios in which he will bring rain, but scenarios for which he can be paid to bring rain.

So one of them is like, I will bring rain up to 30 inches, and then I will be paid $1,000 for every inch between 30 and 40 inches. And then after that, it's free and, you know, like all these different things. So we're negotiating terms of contract, very fine terms, but essentially it comes down to no rain, no pay. That's reasonable. It is reasonable enough so that Councilman Walter Moore can be quoted as saying its heads the city wins, tails Hatfield loses.

So the city council votes four to one to allow Hatfield to get on with his rain making experiments. There was a holdout, Councilman Herbert Fay, objected to the deal vehemently, calling it, and I quote, rank foolishness, end quote. Okay. Well, Herb is one of these podcasters looking backwards and thumbing his nose. I see how it is. Yeah. He's a hater.

Herb the hater. That's what they call him in the city council meetings, that's whatever. One thing that I do think is maybe foolish here on Hatfield's part is that it is only a verbal agreement. There is no written contract. I don't know how we could leave city council chambers without that, but I don't know. I guess it's 1914. I don't know what a chemical is.

So what do I know, really? That was dead. Not again. Four thing. January 1st, 1915, Charlie Hatfield gets to work out by Morena Lake. Now Morena Lake is on the easternmost watershed of San Diego County. There's a range of mountains out there that becomes this watershed divide. So he is on the easternmost edge at Lake Morena, which is the highest point, the highest reservoir

in San Diego. So that means it can essentially facilitate all the other reservoirs downstream and water the entire of the city. He's up there. He's got these chemicals in pans. They're going on these 20-foot tall towers. One witness notes that the noxious chemicals smelled as if, quote, a Limburger cheese factory has broken loose, end quote.

That's one of the ingredients. Exactly. That's another chemical. A lot of dairy, a lot of dairy in there. You wouldn't, you'd be shocked how much would it just dairy, but I'm giving it away. I'm giving too much away. So New Year's Day comes around and we get a light sprinkle. Hatfield is off to a great start.

This is fantastic. Headlines cheer him on. Everybody stoked. We're writing more jingles. More weird jingles. Probably leak jingles. The rain grows steadily stronger and stronger. So that by the time we get to January 15th, just about two weeks into the New Year, there

is 17 inches of rain that falls in the mountains of, you know, where Marino Lake is. And that is some accelerated moisture, aren't you? Thank you. Moisture accelerator. Thanks for getting this all wet, moisture daddy. You listen, you brought this here. I did. This is on you.

This is not my fault. True. This, you're right. It's on me. No, it's on us. We'll be complicit. 17 inches in this area, in the mountainous area of San Diego, to give you a sense, the average yearly rainfall is about 33 inches in this area.

So in two weeks time, we've got 17 inches, which is a lot. And it's, but it's still like it's a doable amount, headlines jingling away. And then over the next five days, the rain gets much too intense. And the San Diego River, which usually is about a few yards wide. It's a very, very small river. My family jokes. It's called the mighty San Diego River. Local humor.

Go pods there for you. With this increased rainfall, expands its banks and it runs a mile wide. So a few yards to an entire mile. There's landslides that happened. A lot of San Diego is sandstone, sandstone canyons. And if you get sandstone at all wet, it just goes, flood waters are washing away homes, any roads, railroad tracks, telephone lines. I mentioned in the beginning that there is a, a commune that has taken up residents

in the Tijuana River Valley and they're called little landers. Again, a weird relic of the turn of the century. They were white midwesterners who came to San Diego with the idea of cohabitive farming on these small plots. They own their own stores to sell their little landers produce. It was beautiful, idyllic. Of course they didn't allow non whites to join whatsoever. So a little weird, especially along an international border, super problematic.

We're not saying you need to be taken out by a flood. We're just saying that you should reexamine that part of your charter and be more inclusive in your politics. That entire community gets washed out. What's so it goes? They can't account for two deaths. I think it was a pair of sisters who were trying to get pulled out in somebody's car and they got swept away and drowned.

Just pretty sad. I think drowning in a flood is a very terrifying, terrifying idea. Yes. It's not, not a very nice thought. At this point, the newspapers are coming back saying like, okay, Hatfield, this is a lot of rain. I think we can chill, chill on the rain, please. Hatfield, Hatfield, please chill out with the fucking rain.

Hatfield, Hatfield, it is driving us insane. Somebody's quoted a property owner in the San Diego union is reported as saying, let's pay Hatfield 10 grand to quit with the rain. The tides are turning. Literally, yes. Yeah. Wait, I have a question. Is he still going out and activating the rain at this point in his way?

Or is he just, the rain has started because of his activation, but he has no stop. I think it's the rain has started because of his activation and it's just, it was a potent, potent round this time around. So he's not going out there with his bucket of Limburger and his shitty little painting train. Just dump it, climb up on a stupid ladder and shake it at the sky. He's not doing that anymore. He's under an umbrella, chilling.

Got you. Yeah. Listen, it's lucrative work. Why not? There's a break in the rain. It stops. Everything seems to be coming back online. There's quite a few telephone lines that are down roads.

And then it starts raining again, January 27th. So we're still in the same month. It's a shit kicker. Exactly. Yeah. OK. Yeah. As a person living in Houston, I can tell you once the ground is saturated and then

it keeps raining, then you're really fucked because there's just nowhere for the water to go. Any type of drainage is just. Yeah. Sitting there. The kitchen sink is just filling up at that point. It's not going anywhere. That's tough.

Oh, that doesn't make me happy at all. January 27th is the day when one of the lower reservoirs, the dam that surrounds the O-Tai reservoir, gives way. It's a stone dam. And it's not that the whole thing comes crashing down, but it starts spilling over and moving along the sides of the dam so that it completely removes one edge of the dam. Erosion. And what comes down this canyon is what people report as a 40-foot wall of water running

towards the coastline. Oh, that was cool. More people are swept away and drowned. Trees, livestock, houses. The entirety of Old Town, which is part of the original Spanish settlement, is wiped away. Mission Valley, which is where historically the Spanish mission is located, kind of nestled up in the valley.

That whole valley is inundated with water. And the rainfall is recorded at 30 inches for just that year. And it is only the end of January. So the average rainfall in San Diego County, in the mountains, it's 33 inches. But on the coast, it's only 10 inches. So we've nearly rippled the amount of rainfall in this area in one month. The coroner estimates that there's about 50 people that have died as a result of the flood.

Communication and transportation lines have been completely severed. In fact, the Santa Fe Railroad, in an attempt to anchor bridges, ran trains out onto bridges, hoping that it would, you know, like... Way down the bridge. Essentially way down the bridge. And then everything got swept away. Communication, transportation, it's all jacked. So for a month there, the only way that San Diegans could get basic supplies and have

any type of communication was through naval ships, through people coming into the bay by boat. Yeah. Oh, wow. That was the lower Otai Mesa dam that broke. Morena Reservoir, where Hatfield was instructed to fill the space, did not break. I did overflow, but it never broke. So Hatfield is there and he's like, I did it, yeah, pay me now.

Did they ever put a ceiling on how much rain he could bring? If you wash out a commune, you're fucked. We don't want that much rain. Do they ever say anything like that? You know, it was a verbal agreement, but I don't think that was in the verbal agreement, no. Right. Okay, well, buyer's remorse.

This is... Monkey's paw. The buyer is saying this is Monkey's paw rules. Absolutely that. Totes. Genie wish rules. The mob that is looking for Hatfield is... They don't feel that way.

They don't watch Judge Taylor. They apparently make the soggy trek out to Morena Lake and they're looking for Hatfield and who knows how historically accurate they are, but apparently they do run into a soggy stranger on the path and he's like, Hatfield, oh, I don't know Hatfield, but Hatfield shows up the next day at Fred Benny's offices for essentially a press conference. He's in downtown San Diego and he pretty much says like, I did the thing, so you got to pay me now, right? He walks over to the county court offices to receive his payment of $10,000 and city

council is like, no, I don't see a contract. We didn't sign anything. You're not getting your money. There's a councilman who is very shrewd and very stern when it comes to this payout for Hatfield, Terrence Cosgrove. Through these negotiations, he repeatedly makes clear to Hatfield, he says, sure, we'll pay you, but by paying you, we also acknowledge that you are responsible for creating this rain and therefore you are responsible for the $3 million worth of damages and so you'll

need to be paying them back. So before we give you the money, you'll be signing this contract that says you're responsible for essentially these damages. I can't lie. I love it. I know, right? Pardon the phrase and I'm not trying to be disrespectful. Watertight.

That is a watertight little trap there. I like it very much. A ziplock bag, tight, tight, tight. I don't know how ethical it is, but I'm willing to suspend the ethics because I don't believe that this man waving chemicals at this guy actually didn't do anything. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Morals out the door. The other thing that's very shrewd about Cosgrove is there are some city council people who are willing to say, listen, we verbally hired him to make it rain and it motherfucking rained. Just give him the money. It's fine. I appreciate the honor of that. Yes, but I think Cosgrove is also being very smart because if city council pays Hatfield

the money, then they are taking responsibility for causing this rain. They are already having to foot this huge bill, but they don't need all of that attention turned on them either. You know, that is, that too is a good point. That too is a very good point because who hired the rainmaker? Exactly. This thing gets pulled into arbitration for another 20 years. It is not until 1938.

So no. Yes, my dude. Shut up. No more. It's over. To wait. I was literally right. As you said, 20 years.

I was thinking this must have been the bane of whatever judge this landed on. It's this petty nonsense about garbage, about, I mean, not garbage in that lives are obviously hanging in the balance, but it's like, you're just, you're lying and doing a tactic and you didn't actually do anything here. So it's not like you deserve to get paid, but they are scamming you. It's very complicated. And for 20 years, this went on, because it just kept getting like the buck kept getting past.

It was just like, oh, we're going to delay this. Oh, we're going to, oh, Hatfield's back. We're just going to, I don't know, until finally. They were waiting for him to die. I think so. I think so. Until finally a judge came down with a decision and that judge deemed that this was an act of God and there was no way that Hatfield would be responsible, nor would the city be

responsible. So the city wipes its hands of Hatfield. I'm comfortable with that. Do you want to describe an act of God in an American legal context? I think it's like a, it's a, it's an occurrence where nobody can be found at fault. At the time that it was written, it had very, it had a very religious meaning and it still does. It's an act of God as a very religious turn of phrase.

But if you're a secular person, Josie's explanation is what it means legally. So Hatfield goes on with a continued relatively successful career. San Diego refused to pay him, but there were plenty of others who were happy to do so. He gets offers to make it rain as far away as Cuba. They didn't have Yelp. They didn't have Yelp. They didn't know. They just didn't know.

No. He gets offers from outfits in Honduras. He's hired to protect the country's banana crop. And in 1921, he signs the biggest contract that he's ever had is an excess of $25,000 to bring five inches of rain to Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada, there for you. Oh wow. He'd come over here. Get for him.

He came all the way up there. And then the Dust Bowl hits in the thirties. It creates a situation where no one is in a position to pay him for his services. Everybody is working at an extreme loss. But the flip side of that is that the Great Depression in conjunction with the Dust Bowl paved the way for the creation of reliable irrigation systems through the works program that the second Roosevelt had set up to jumpstart the economy. But that's not very good if you're a rainmaker, though, is it?

It's not too great because it's much more reliable, that irrigation. Then waving a pan of chemicals at the sky, yes. Yes. All that cheesy chemical up into the sky. Cheesy goodness. Just take a fondue pot and just wave it. See what happens. That's science for you, kids.

By the end of his life, Hatfield goes back to selling sewing machines. It's true. What you love. It's one true love. You always find your way back. You're never too old. I think that's so sweet. Isn't that nice?

He dies in 1958 with the secret of his 23 chemicals. So no one ever knows what's in that special sauce, in that cheesy, cheesy special sauce. Before he dies, though, 1956, there is a Hollywood film that's very loosely based on him called The Rainmaker, starring Bert Langcaster and Catherine Hepburn. Okay. How loose are we talking? We're talking pretty loose. The character has the very charlatan vibes, and he's also interested in tornadoes.

It's not just rain. It's a loose one. If you're a Hatfield purist, you're watching it scoffing a reel in your eyes, being like, he didn't even care about tornadoes. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You're pissed.

You're writing an angry Yelp review. Yeah. First of all, in scene four, he was not wearing glasses in the AM to know that he was nearsighted. So. Yeah. That kind of thing? Yeah. No, exactly.

Paloo the Culture is still around today. It does have a different name. It's now called Cloud Seating. So instead of it being focused on making it rain, it is focused in the way that Hatfield was focused on making clouds that are already there produce more precipitation. Is it reliable? Is it still seen as a pseudoscience, or is there merit to it? It's not seen as a pseudoscience, I'd say.

There are 52 countries that have active cloud seeding programs, but it's not seen as very efficient. I think that's mainly what it is. So maybe that's just another way to say pseudoscience, but in terms of watering crops or bringing water to arid climates, like what Hatfield was trying to do, it's not really the way to go. It's not very efficient at all. Right.

So. So. It comes to this question, was Charles Hatfield successful in making it rain? The answer is, maybe, to some degree, question mark? We were still wondering. Well, to the extent that the 1916 flood in San Diego should be attributed to his science experiment out by Lake Mariana, probably not. No, he is not making it rain.

Is there a reason, I guess, then, now that we've ascertained that it wasn't this man, which I, or listen, was most likely not this man. Miracles do happen, and I do gather that, look, if we're judging the contract based on whether he made it rain, it's dicey. If we're judging the contract based on whether it rained, it did rain. Amen. So. Yes.

With all that said, is there a reason meteorologically that this period of intense drought would then be followed by a period of intense rainfall? Yes. The answer is definitely yes, especially in this part of the world. Airds Southern California is known to have irregular weather patterns that bring in moisture from the Pacific. El Nino years are years where there is buku rainfall in San Diego, at least for that area. Southern meteorologists surmised that January 1916 was a very unique weather year in that

it was probably a confluence of not one, but two atmospheric rivers over Southern California, which can't account for this level of unprecedented rainfall. And I know you know a little something about atmospheric rivers, because wasn't it last winter when you were wet to the bone because of one? Was I? I don't know. I thought so. It's been so long, dude.

It's. You know what? I have a family to feed. I've got bills to pay. I don't know. That was dead. What am I supposed to do? That was dead.

She died, dude. Well, atmospheric rivers, it's a shit ton of water in the sky that can come down. And the idea of one and a certain weather pattern is is a lot of rain. And if we're talking about two, then that can certainly account for the tripled inches of rainfall that occurred in San Diego. So an all likelihood hat field, as you say, is not making it rain. But what is probable is that he was a highly skilled self taught meteorologist and he was able to read weather patterns to discern when he needed to be in places where heavy rains

were expected. So a.k.a. That's a crook, baby. Yeah. Yeah. That's fair. I mean, call it what you want. I might just say that's an entrepreneur, and I say, have at it, go ahead, go get your

rise and grind, baby, go get your bank, rise and grind, cold showers, let's go. But you're not making it rain. You're just adept at knowing when it's going to rain and showing up, right? And it could be that, you know, for for his small experimentation, like above, like Morena, he was able to increase the rainfall there small amount. But there's absolutely no way that he could account for the increased rainfall on the coast. That's 60 miles away.

That's way too far for this little, like, you know, exhaust pipe. It's just that's not gonna. Yes. Sky too big. It's like I was saying, sky too big. I don't buy it. Yeah. Still to this day, though, that 1916 flood is called the Hat Field Flood.

Oh, wow, really? It's, I mean, it's called a few different things, but you couldn't easily find it in the historical record as the Hat Field Flood. That's so, and they didn't even pay the guy either. I love it. Pay your contractors, folks, pay your artists. This is getting ridiculous. I would argue, you know what, he didn't, God, this is, there's, there's a real ethical

qualm here and it's because both sides are so stupid, you know? I agree. Yeah. I totally agree. I'm like, I find, I find both of you dishonest here. So like, what, what is the question of deserving is really under a lot of stress. It is. It truly is.

I don't come as cleanly down as you that he wasn't a charlatan. I'm not convinced, but. Let's say we're 80, 50 years from now and cloud seating is like a very regular thing. When we might be in a position to be like Charles Mallory Hat Field, the inventor of modern day cloud seating, like I think there, I think there might be some historical spin on that. Like if it were more efficient today, we might have some more positive views of this burgeoning scientist, of the scientist who's like just at the edge and trying to figure this stuff

out being like, wow, he like didn't really do it, but he kind of maybe. Getting it. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. No, you know what? We're laughing, but I feel bad. I feel bad.

Okay. Listen, I've never wanted to discourage someone from pursuing a dream. And if he made it go a bit clearly good for him, I don't really think he killed all those people. So I don't hold that against him. Yeah. So we're fine. I'm square with Hat Field.

Yeah. So I look forward to warmly listening back to this in a rain drenched future where we've all gotten the cleavage culture to finally honed and we're just sitting in our underwater homes and we're paging through the paper and then we look and we see Adele is dead. Oh, fuck. Damn it. Adele, long live Adele. I'm not wishing any bad on Adele.

I hope she looks so long and healthy like. Thanks for tuning in. If you want more infamy, go to bittersweetinfamy.com or search for us wherever you find podcasts. We usually release new episodes every other Sunday. You can also follow us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy. If you liked the show, consider subscribing, leaving a review or just telling a friend. Stay sweet. The sources that I used for this week's Minfamous were the loudest recorded sound in history,

literally sent shockwaves around the world on Classic FM by Maddie Shaw-Roberts, May 11th, 2022. Experience, I invented the Vuvuzela World Cup 2010 by Freddie Maake in The Guardian. July 9th, 2010. Band the Vuvuzela by John Quilane in News 24, February 7th, 2005. I also looked up the Wikipedia article for Vuvuzela and we used the Vuvuzela sound at Cape Town Stadium World Cup 2010. It was the video you heard a clip from. It's hosted on YouTube by SW17ChelseaSG. I also read from Gregory Unra in The Sweet Spot of Sustainability Strategy in the fall 2013 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.

And I read Sunship's New 100% Composable Bag is Hilariously Ear-Damaging Loud by Kyle Van Hemert, August 19th, 2010 in Gizmodo. I also read Sunship's Failed Noisy Composable Packaging Gets the Last Laugh by Zian Lum in Huffington Post, January 18th, 2020. The sources that I used for this episode were an LA Times article entitled, With San Diego Again Drought Written, A 1915 Rainmaker Saga is Revisited. Written by Tony Perra, published May 25th, 2015. I also read the article Hatfield the Rainmaker, written by Thomas W. Patterson, published Winter of 1970 in volume 6, number 1, and the Journal of San Diego History. I read the article Hatfield the Rainmaker by Barbara Tuthill, published in Western Folkler, volume 13, number 2 slash 3.

In that same journal, Western Folkler, I read the article Rainmakers in San Diego by Ed Cray, volume 20, number 4, and 1961. I read an article when San Diego hired a Rainmaker a century ago, it poured, by Christopher Klein, published December 12th, 2015 on JStore Daily. I also read a dissertation by Milford Wayne Donaldson, entitled Charles Mallory Hatfield, called The Culturist Extraordinaire. It was submitted in Partial Satisfaction of the Requirement for the Degree of Master of Arts in History, published by University of San Diego in the year 2000.

And lastly, I looked at Wikipedia articles for the Panama-California Expo, and the Panama-Pacific International Expo, Charles Hatfield, and Morena and Sweetwater Dance. The interstitial music you heard earlier is by Mitchell Collins, and the song you are listening to now is Tea Street by Brian Steele.