The moral of this story? The next time you need a well drilled, make sure someone has checked to see what you are drilling into!
Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
the rainman
don’t wish for too much of a good thing
Maybe it is just my imagination, but there seems to be a drought every summer. No matter how much it rains every fall, winter, and spring, those guys on the news are always declaring a water emergency within a couple of weeks of the onset of summer.
As taxpayers, we should demand that our politicians do something about this recurring problem. Just spend the money and fix it.
You’re probably sitting there right now scratching your head. You’re wondering how in the world could those guys in Washington ever solve the water problem. Well, 1 am here to tell you that not only is a solution theoretically possible but it has actually been done.
Take the case of a man named Charles Mallory Hatfield. Charlie, who has long since passed on, was technically known as a pluviculturist.
A pluvio Who? What?
That’s just science speak for a rainmaker, although Hatfield preferred the term moisture accelerator. Hatfield is perhaps the most famous of all of the rainmen who ever walked this blue planet that we call home.
He was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1875. His family eventually settled on a farm in Southern California in the 1880s. He quit school after the ninth grade to become a salesman for the New Home Sewing Machine Company. Around this time, Hatfield began his first experiments in rainmaking. By 1902, he had perfected his rainmaking techniques which involved a secret mixture of some twenty-three chemicals (some have reasoned that it was hydrogen and powdered zinc) and large galvanized evaporating tanks.
In February 1904, he promised to deliver to the citizens of Los Angeles a whopping eighteen inches of rainfall between that December and the following April. Perched up on a twentyfoot-tall wooden tower, Hatfield released plumes of his secret recipe into the air above La Crescenta. Almost immediately, it started to rain. The Weather Bureau claimed that Hatfield’s rain was really part of a much larger storm, but that didn’t stop Hatfield from taking claim. This success allowed Hatfield to achieve folk hero status in the region and to pick up the nickname the “Rainmaker.”
He was rehired in December to bring more rain to the drought-stricken region. Hatfield guaranteed the people of Los Angeles that he could deliver at least eighteen inches of rain by late April. By the middle of March he was only a fraction of an inch short of his goal. For his efforts, Hatfield received $1,000 in cash plus even more priceless publicity. Hatfield took to the lecture circuit and took on the misnomer of professor.
In 1905, Alaska was suffering from a major summer drought and the miners were complaining. Oddly, they were not upset because they were thirsty or because their crops wouldn’t grow. No, it turns out that they needed the water to collect gold. Since most of the gold in Alaska was in the form of placer deposits, the miners needed high running waters to separate the gold particles from the rest of the junk rock.
There was obviously something wrong in this neighborhood. So who were they going to call?
Ghostbusters, of course.
Oops … Wrong story.
Of course, the miners contacted America’s premier moisture accelerator-Charles Hatfield.
The deal that Hatfield made with the Alaskans was actually quite simple. A board of seven men would decide how much rainfall Hatfield would have to provide. If he met their goal, then he would receive payment of ten thousand bucks. If Hatfield failed, he would receive only enough money to cover his transportation and living expenses.
Hatfield set up shop in early June 1906. Once again he assembled the tall towers and mixed up large batches of his home brew. Hatfield stirred and stirred this magic potion. Boil, boil, toil and trouble. Large clouds of smoke went soaring skyward. Yet, by late July, Hatfield produced barely a drop of rain. In fact, it was one of the driest Julys on record. Alaskan residents grew increasingly impatient with this man. Hatfield was basically driven out of town, but not before he secured about $1,100 to cover his expenses.
One would think that with Hatfield’s career ruined this would have been the end of the story, but it was not. Let’s face it, no one ever lists all of the jobs that he fails at on his resume. Many people still believed in Hatfield’s abilities and the rainmaking jobs continued to pour (get it?) in.
In December 1915, members of the San Diego Wide Awake Improvement Club approached Hatfield. You know exactly what they wanted-good old H-two-O. It seems that San Diego had built its Morena reservoir back in 1897, but due to low rainfall, it had never come close to reaching capacity. City planners knew that the city’s growth hinged on an ample water supply.
Hatfield offered the city a deal with the following stipulations. If he provided less than forty inches of rain, the city would owe him nothing. The city would compensate Hatfield at the rate of $1,000 per inch between forty and fifty inches. Any rainfall above fifty inches would also be free.
The city seemed uninterested in Hatfield’s apparent quackery, so he modified the proposal. He offered to fill the reservoir up to capacity for a flat $10,000. If he failed to do so within one year’s time, the city would owe him absolutely nothing. With nothing to lose, the city council decided to hire him.
Well, one should be very, very, very, very careful what one asks for.
In early January 1916, Hatfield and his brother Paul did their usual routine of setting up his evaporating tanks on high platforms near the Morena Dam. Within days the clouds rolled in and it started to pour.
And it rained …
And rained …
And rained …
Well, you get the idea.
The sudden downpour flooded the region. Homes and farms were flooded. Roads in and out of the region were under many feet of water. Getting supplies into the city became nearly impossible. The rain stopped on January 20, but the dry spell lasted only a few days.
And it rained …
So much water fell from the sky that both the Otay and Sweetwater reservoirs reached capacity and eventually overflowed. On the evening of January 27, 1926, the Lower Otay dam gave way and approximately 13 billion gallons of water rushed down the valley in its journey to the sea. Nearly twenty people (the exact number varies with different sources) were killed by the water’s torrent. Houses were swept off their foundations. Railroad service had to be discontinued to the region because long stretches of track had been washed away. All but two of the region’s 112 bridges were wiped out. The destruction of telephone and telegraph lines assured a total lack of communication.
Surprisingly, the Hatfield brothers were oblivious to all of the damage that they were causing farther down the valley. When the rain finally tapered off, the Morena reservoir was within inches of its capacity. They had succeeded in fulfilling their contract.
While dismantling their equipment, the brothers learned that a group of angry farmers was coming after them. Under the assumed name of the Benson brothers, they quickly packed up and fled to San Diego to get their money.
Of course, the city refused to pay Hatfield. It seems that in all the excitement to start his rainmaking process, Charles apparently had never signed the contract. Oops! No contract meant that the city did not have to pay. Hatfield threatened to sue, so the city offered him a deal that he had no choice but to refuse. The city told Hatfield that it would pay him the $10,000 if he agreed to assume all liability for the estimated sixty deaths and $3.5 million in damages caused by the floods. Hatfield wasn’t a fool, so he refused their offer and filed suit.
The Sweetwater Dam before Charles Hatfield launched the storm that would ultimately destroy it. (Library of Congress)
Eventually, two different court decisions ruled that Hatfield’s great flood was an act of God. This meant that since Hatfield did not cause the rain, he could receive no compensation for his efforts. One of Hatfield’s lawsuits remained on th
e books until 1938, at which time the courts declared the suit a dead issue.
Hatfield may have been denied payment, but word spread worldwide about his San Diego rainmaking success. Queries for Hatfield’s services came from all over the world, although he continued to do the majority of his work in the California region. A 1929 contract involved dousing a raging forest fire in Honduras in a mere ten days. The onset of the depression forced Hatfield to retire from his life as a rainmaker. He settled into the Eagle Rock suburb of Los Angeles and returned to his life as a sewing machine salesman.
During his lifetime, he had claimed to have had caused over five hundred successful rainmaking events. In 1956, Hatfield was invited to attend the Hollywood premiere of the movie The Rainmaker, starring Burt Lancaster. (Any guesses who inspired the movie?) When Hatfield died on January 12, 1958, at the age of eighty-two, he took his rainmaking secrets to the grave. 1 guess that we will never know if he was a real rainmaker or just another quack.
Useless? Useful? l’ll leave that for you to decide.
PRHT 3:
inuentiue
genius
kittg fitter
what’s the scoop?
It was a cold day way back in January 1948 that a chance encounter would launch a near billiondollar-a-year industry. Yes, it was on this day in the village of Cassopolis, Michigan, that a woman named Kay Draper ran into some serious trouble: the sand pile that she used to fill her cat’s litter box was frozen solid.
Kay decided to try using ashes in the litter box. She quickly ran into a bigger problem; those little paws produced jet-black paw prints all over her house. Clearly, ashes were not the solution to her problem. So, Kay decided to try sawdust, another popular alternative, in the cat pan. That didn’t work well, either. Next, Kay went to visit her neighbors, the Lowes, who operated a coal, ice, and sawdust supply company.
Whoa! Wait a minute. A sawdust supply company? People actually sold this waste product? Let’s sidetrack from our story for a moment.
You read it correctly. Sawdust. You may find it hard to believe, but there once was a market for this stuff. They sold it as an industrial absorbent. Spill some grease or oil-drop some sawdust on it to absorb the spill. You get the idea. As you can imagine, sawdust and oil have one major problem-fire! So, the Lowes introduced a new absorbent material for these spills-a kiln-dried clay known as Fuller’s Earth.
Now we can get back to our story where we find Kay Draper visiting the Lowe facility in search of some sand for her cat’s litter box…
Here she ran into a twenty-seven-year-old guy named Ed Lowe, who was working for his dad after his stint in the Navy. Ed was trying to expand the family business and had been unsuccessful in trying to convince chicken farmers to use the Fuller’s Earth as a nesting material. And, like any good salesman, Ed had his trunk filled with his product.
You know where this story is leading.
Ed couldn’t peddle the clay to the chicken farmers, but he somehow convinced Kay that it would make a great cat litter. (Not that he had ever tried it on a cat.)
Edward Lowe’s invention of Kitty Litter, shown here in an early photograph, launched an entire industry devoted to cats. (Copyright 2000 by the Edward Lowe Foundation. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.)
Kay shortly returned for more of the clay granules. She recommended the stuff to her friends, and soon they came calling for some Fuller’s Earth. Ed had a hunch that he might be on to something big. He filled ten paper bags with the stuff and labeled them with a grease pencil-you guessed it-Kitty Litter.
The stuff was not an overnight success, however. The initial five-pound bags sold for sixty-five cents, but no one would buy them. Ed told the local pet store owner to give the bags away, which he did. Once the customers saw how wonderful the product was, they were actually willing to pay money for the stuff.
Ed traveled the country attending cat shows and visiting pet shops in an attempt to move the product. Cat owners eventually fell in love with the product, and the rest is cat litter history.
A private investment group, collectively known as Golden Cat, purchased Ed’s company for over $200 million plus stock options in 1990. Ed retired and used part of his fortune to establish the Edward Lowe Foundation to help other entrepreneurs. Sadly, Ed Lowe passed away on October 4, 1995.
The success of Kitty Litter enabled pet owners to keep cats inside their homes with little muss or fuss (let’s not discuss smell). As a result, an entire industry consisting of cat foods, toys, grooming products, and the like was launched.
Today, the traditional clay cat litter that Ed Lowe introduced still commands the lion’s share of the market at approximately 55 percent.
Catching up with 40 percent of sales is clumping litter. Clumping litter is made from clays such as sodium bentonite or attapulgus (it was originally found in Attapulgus, Georgia). These special clays bond well with a cat’s waste and form hard clumps that can be easily removed from the litter box.
The remainder of the litter market is made up of a very wide variety of products. Pretty much anything goes here. They use silica gel beads, cedar chips, pelletized newspaper, peels from citrus fruits, peanut hulls, corncobs, and semolina wheat. (Maybe someone can figure out how to use all of our tossedout nonabsorbent plastic.)
What started out as a pile of nesting material has turned into an estimated 2.5 billion-pound, three-quarters-of a-billiondollar industry that even has its own Washington lobbyist.
Now you know the scoop.
Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
einstein’s refrigerator
he really did design modern iceboxes
Einstein.
It’s amazing how many images that one simple name brings to mind. Genius. Scientist. Theory of relativity. E=mc2. Messy hair.
Yet, what few people know is that Einstein actually spent a number of years inventing refrigerators. And this occurred years after he became the most famous scientist in the world.
So, you’re probably sitting there wondering why a man with a Nobel Prize, worldwide fame, and genius intellect would stoop so low as to waste his time working on such a mundane project as refrigerators.
Well, to Einstein this seemed like a very important project. According to most accounts, Einstein was sitting in Germany one day in the early 1920s and came across a newspaper article that described the death of an entire family-a mother, father, and their children. Apparently, they had been killed in their sleep by a poisonous coolant that had leaked out of their refrigerator.
Keep in mind that most people still had iceboxes at this time. Newfangled mechanical refrigerators were starting to gain popularity, but as the brief news story above attests, they could be very dangerous. All of the coolants available in the early days of refrigeration (ammonia, sulfur dioxide, and methyl chloride) were very toxic and would kill if they leaked out into the home.
Einstein knew that there had to be a better way. (At this point 1 see images of Einstein throwing on his Super Genius uniform and flying to the rescue in a Superman-like fashion.)
Enter into the picture a guy named Leo Szilard. Szilard is considered by many to be the father of the nuclear age, but he was just starting his career at this time. He was the person who envisioned the nuclear chain reaction that could be used to generate massive amounts of power (apparently the No Nukes movement had not taken hold that early in the century). Szilard later realized that the chain reaction could be used to build weapons of mass destruction and urged Einstein to write that now famous letter to President Roosevelt (the one that was the catalyst for the whole Manhattan Project).
The two great scientific minds came together and concluded that the problem with refrigeration was not just limited to the poisonous coolant. The fact that refrigerators were mechanical in nature was the real culprit. Anyone with even the slightest mechanical experience knows that moving parts cause wear and tear on any system. Eliminate the moving parts and the system will probably n
ever leak.
As great physicists, the men realized that they could use their knowledge of thermodynamics to produce a cooling system that did not involve any type of mechanical motion.
Einstein and Szilard came up with many different designs, but decided to focus on the three most promising concepts. While modern refrigeration utilizes mechanical compressors, the scientists conceptualized refrigerators that depended on three totally independent scientific principles: that of electromagnetism, absorption, and diffusion. Let’s not forget that all of their designs contained no moving parts.
In early 1926, Szilard filed the first of many patents that the two men would share. Since Einstein had spent so many of his early years working in the Swiss Patent Office, they were able to prepare the patent applications without the help of expensive lawyers.
Of course, a patent is nice, but earning $$$ is even better. That same year, Szilard also negotiated a contract with the German company Bamag-Meguin. Unfortunately, the deal fell through less than a year later when the company ran into financial difficulties and was forced to drop many questionable research projects.
With a name like Einstein, one would guess that it wouldn’t be difficult to find another manufacturer to pick up the project. Within a few short months, the two scientists were able to sign contracts with the Swedish firm AB Electrolux and the German A.E.G. (essentially the German General Electric Company). AB Electrolux paid Einstein and Szilard approximately $750 for their patents (about $10,000 in turn-of-the-millennium funds). Yet, the company never developed the refrigeration concepts any further. In typical corporate fashion, the patents were purchased by Electrolux simply to eliminate any competition to their own designs.
The A.E.G. (which stands for Allgemeine Elektrizitats Gesellschaft, just in case you needed to know), however, decided to develop what later became known as the Einstein-Szilard electromagnetic pump for use in a refrigerator.
DANGER! WILL ROBINSON. DANGER!
TECHNICAL INFORMATION AHEAD!
Einstein's Refrigerator: And Other Stories from the Flip Side of History Page 5
