Still thought of as paeans to fertility: Green, The Storm-God in the Ancient Near East, 76–83.
Bulls were a common rain-god motif: Stephen H. Schneider, Terry L. Root, and Michael D. Mastrandrea, eds., The Encyclopedia of Climate and Weather, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), “Religion and Weather,” 5.
The Aztecs had tried to please: Isabel De La Cruz, Angelica Gonzalez-Oliver, Brian M. Kemp, Juan A. Roman, David Glenn Smith, and Alfonso Torre-Blanco, “Sex Identification of Children Sacrificed to the Ancient Aztec Rain Gods in Tlatelolco,” Current Anthropology, vol. 49, no. 3 (June 2008), 519–26.
Jewish tradition identifies: Isaacs, The Jewish Sourcebook on the Environment and Ecology, 155.
In Sanskrit, the word for rain: Sir Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2005 reprint; originally published in 1899 by Oxford University Press), 1013.
Hindus consider rivers female: Vasudha Narayanan, “Water, Wood, and Wisdom: Ecological Perspectives from the Hindu Traditions,” Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 130, no. 4 (Fall 2001), 179–206.
The Australians also attributed: Schneider et al., The Encyclopedia of Climate and Weather, vol. 1: “Religion and Weather,” 5.
Other storm gods became known: David Leeming, The Oxford Companion to World Mythology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 401.
One cuneiform tablet describes Iškur: Douglas R. Frayne, The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Early Periods, vol. 4: Old Babylonian Period (2003–1595 BC) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 271–72.
“Above, Adad made scarce his rain”: Albert T. Clay, A Hebrew Deluge Story in Cuneiform and Other Epic Fragments in the Pierpont Morgan Library, Yale Oriental Series: Researches, vol. 5, part 3 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1922), 17–18.
As Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, explained: John Wesley, Wesley’s Notes on the Bible, “John Wesley’s Notes on the Whole Bible, New Testament,” Christian Classics Ethereal Library, XXVI, 4 (full text at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/wesley/notes.html).
The newly settled Israelites: Daniel Hillel, The Natural History of the Bible: An Environmental Exploration of the Hebrew Scriptures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 157.
“And it shall come to pass”: Deuteronomy 11:13–15, 21st Century King James version, www.biblegateway.com.
“Take heed to yourselves”: Deuteronomy 11:16–17, ibid.
“The Lord shall open”: Deuteronomy 28:12, ibid.
As Rabbi Tanchum bar Chiyya put it: Isaacs, The Jewish Sourcebook on the Environment and Ecology, 159.
“In the wilderness of the desert”: Clift and Plumb, The Asian Monsoon, 226.
But it is often the wettest: Author interview, Clift; and Clift and Plumb, The Asian Monsoon, 223.
Krishna’s skin is storm-blue: Author interview with Narayanan.
In 2001, the Indian government: Ishaan Tharoor, “The World of the Kumbh Mela: Inside the Largest Single Gathering of Humanity,” Time, January 15, 2013.
A crush of devotees waits: Kamakhya Temple, “Ambubachi Mela,” http://www.kamakhyatemple.org/Ambubachi.aspx.
Mythology surrounding the Saraswati: Author interview with Narayanan.
Woolley was not trying to make history: William Ryan and Walter Pitman, Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 53–54.
Rainbows exist as a sign of this pact: Genesis chapters 7 through 9, 21st Century King James Version, www.biblegateway.com.
He loved the work so much: Norman Cohn, Noah’s Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 11–14.
Smith was “a highly nervous, sensitive man”: Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, The Rise and Progress of Assyriology (London: Richard Clay & Sons, 1925), 153.
He wrote of the moment: Ryan and Pittman, Noah’s Flood, 28.
According to a colleague’s written account: Ibid.
The telling is near-exact to Genesis: Ryan and Pitman, Noah’s Flood, 28.
The flood tale got around: Cohn, Noah’s Flood, 8–9.
His 1929 book, Ur of the Chaldees: Ryan and Pitman, Noah’s Flood, 55.
It describes a deluge: David R. Montgomery, The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 154; and Cohn, Noah’s Flood, 1.
For two decades, Ryan and Pitman have built evidence: Personal communication with William Ryan; Ryan and Pitman, Noah’s Flood; and K. K. Eris, W. B. F. Ryan, et al., “The Timing and Evolution of Post-glacial Transgression Across the Sea of Marmara Shelf South of Istanbul,” Marine Geology, vol. 243 (2007), 57–76.
The geologists hypothesize: Ryan and Pitman, Noah’s Flood, 234.
FOUR: THE WEATHER WATCHERS
“the Wind encreased”: Daniel Defoe and Richard Hamblyn, The Storm: Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Richard Hamblyn (London: Penguin, 2005), 26.
Had he been killed: John J. Miller, “Writing Up a Storm,” Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2011.
Not a bad guess: Maximillian Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 138.
He was fined two hundred marks: Charlie Connelly, Bring Me Sunshine (London: Little, Brown, 2012), 209.
On the morning of the 27th: Defoe and Hamblyn, The Storm, 34.
Hardly anyone had slept: Ibid.
Defoe’s eyewitness account: Miller, “Writing Up a Storm.”
Defoe placed ads: Connelly, Bring Me Sunshine, 211.
The heart of The Storm: Defoe and Hamblyn, The Storm, 64.
Emerging atmospheric science shows up alongside: Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660–1794 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 94.
“I cannot doubt but the Atheist’s hard’ned Soul”: Defoe and Hamblyn, The Storm, 7.
The earliest-known recorded rain science: Ian Strangeways, Precipitation: Theory, Measurement and Distribution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 6.
“Was there ever a shower”: Aristophanes, “The Clouds,” 423 B.C., in Selected Writings on Socrates (London: Collector’s Library, 2004), 378.
Soaking into the earth: Malcolm Wilson, Structure and Method in Aristotle’s Meteorologica: A More Disorderly Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 46, 60.
“In front of the storehouse”: Strangeways, Precipitation, 139.
Sejong wanted every village: Park Seong-Rae, Science and Technology in Korean History: Excursions, Innovations, and Issues (Fremont, Calif.: Jain Publishing Co. Asian Humanities Press, 2005), 100.
European weather watchers: Defoe and Hamblyn, The Storm, 27.
But it is no surprise: Strangeways, Precipitation, 141.
In Italy, Evangelista Torricelli: N. C. Datta, The Story of Chemistry (Hyderabad, India: Universities Press India, 2005), 86–87.
Torricelli also gave science: Gabrielle Walker, An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007), 8–11.
“All the clouds knew”: Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (New York: Del Ray Trade Paperback Edition, 2009), 10.
His least-favorite: Ibid., 8–9.
Some lexicographers suggest: Elizabeth Knowles, The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (New York: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 2006), 593.
Linguists mapping dialect: William A. Kretzschmar Jr., The Linguistics of Speech (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 89–92.
Clouds “are commonly as good”: Gavin Pretor-Pinney, The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds (New York: Perigee/Penguin, 2006), 186.
Twice a day: Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 82–83.
Howard’s proposed classification: Ibid., 50.
As the British cloud enthusiast: Pretor-Pinney, The Cloudspotter’s Guide, 53.
It is brilliantly simple: Scott Huler, Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale, and How a 19th-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), 8.
The latter was often more thrilling: Lance Morrow, “The Religion of Big Weather,” Time, vol. 147, no. 4 (January 22, 1996), 72.
So it was with the man: “George James Symons, F.R.S.,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, Great Britain, vol. 26, no. 114 (April 1900), 155.
Historians of science: Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 100.
The first issue: “George James Symons, F.R.S.,” 174.
As they tried to save lives: Anderson, Predicting the Weather, 15.
For one, the large ship-salvage companies: Malcolm Walker, History of the Meteorological Office (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), xvii.
By 1865, the British Rainfall Organisation: “George James Symons, F.R.S.,” 155.
He ultimately gathered: Connelly, Bring Me Sunshine, 41–42.
With kind, crinkly eyes: H. Sowerby Wallis, British Rainfall 1899: On the Distribution of Rain over the British Isles During the Year 1899 (London, 1900), 18.
He maintained a patient: Anderson, Predicting the Weather, 100.
“Vulgar fractions should never be employed”: Hugh Robert Mill, British Rainfall 1905: On the Distribution of Rain in Space and Time over the British Isles During the Year 1905, 45th Annual Volume (London, 1906), 272.
Such a move would undermine: Anderson, Predicting the Weather, 103.
Espy sold the notion: Mark Monmonier, Air Apparent: How Meteorologists Learned to Map, Predict, and Dramatize the Weather (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 39.
Abbe designed: Ibid., 48.
Only thirty years old: W. J. Humphreys, “Cleveland Abbe, 1838–1916,” NOAA History, Giants of Science, http://www.history.noaa.gov/giants/abbe.html.
A petition from the Great Lakes: Monmonier, Air Apparent, 48.
Congress approved: Ibid., 49.
When he died in 1880: Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, September 11, 1880, 19.
The real scientist behind: “Edward Lorenz, Father of Chaos Theory and Butterfly Effect, Dies at 90,” MIT News, April 16, 2008.
The satellites and supercomputers: Jason Samenow, “The National Hurricane Center’s Strikingly Accurate Forecast for Sandy,” Washington Post, November 1, 2012.
Yet rain continues to defy Big Data: Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008.
National Weather Service statistics: Nate Silver, “The Weatherman Is Not a Moron,” New York Times, September 7, 2012.
On July 28, 1997: James Brooke, “Flash Flood at Colorado Trailer Parks Kills 5 and Injures 40,” New York Times, July 30, 1997.
Doesken has never forgiven himself: Author interview with Nolan Doesken, June 26, 2014.
Journalists were eager: Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2010), 150.
Niles’ Weekly ran: “Rain,” Niles’ National Register, vol. 75, no. 4 (January 24, 1849), 159.
The New York Times began: Paul Martin Lester, Visual Communication: Images with Messages (Boston: Wadsworth, 2014), 213.
Like most things in newspapers: Monmonier, Air Apparent, 160.
During the New Deal: Robert Henson, Weather on Air: A History of Broadcast Meteorology (Boston: American Meteorological Society, 2010), 6.
One of the classics: James C. Fidler obituary, Austin American Statesman, May 5, 2007.
“By telephone, telegraph, teletype”: Henson, Weather on Air, 7.
New York City’s first television weathercast: Ibid.
Many of the first broadcasters: Nick Ravo, “Clint Youle, 83, Early Weatherman on TV,” obituary, New York Times, July 31, 1999.
“The result was TV weather’s wildest”: Henson, Weather on Air, 11.
Nashville poet-forecaster Bill Williams: Ibid.
Broadcasting the weather at his hometown station: Ibid., 3.
Before she became a movie star and sex symbol: Ibid.
She couldn’t tell whether: Nicola D. Gutgold, Seen and Heard: The Women of Television News (Plymouth, U.K.: Lexington Books, 2008), 146.
“A trained gorilla”: Henson, Weather on Air, 32.
He dreamed of a twenty-four-hour national cable network: Frank Batten with Jeffrey L. Cruikshank, The Weather Channel: The Improbable Rise of a Media Phenomenon (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002), 39.
For years, federal meteorologists: Ibid., 70.
Critics dismissed the channel: Alan Fields, Partly Sunny: The Weather Junkie’s Guide to Outsmarting the Weather (Boulder, Colo.: Windsor Peak Press, 1995), 40.
Landmark invested $32 million: Batten and Cruikshank, The Weather Channel, 127.
“Heat-wave alert”: Henson, Weather on Air, 11.
The idea was for the forecasters: Craig Wilson, “Sunny Skies over the Weather Channel,” USA Today, June 7, 2007.
Reporting from the field: Ibid.
“It was awesome”: Jim Cantore, interview by Karen Herman, Archive of American Television, April 24, 2013.
In 2008, NBC: Michael J. de la Merced, “Weather Channel Is Sold to NBC and Equity Firms,” New York Times, July 7, 2008.
The man with the twenty-four-hour weather dreams: Batten and Cruikshank, The Weather Channel, 127.
He called global warming: Charles Homans, “Hot Air: Why Don’t TV Weathermen Believe in Climate Change?” Columbia Journalism Review, January 7, 2010.
He joined an estimated quarter: Leslie Kaufman, “Among Weathercasters Doubt on Warming,” New York Times, March 29, 2010.
Wheel of Fortune’s host: Pat Sajak, “Manmade Global Warming: The Solution,” on Ricochet: Conservative Conversation and Community, July 25, 2010, http://ricochet.com/archives/manmade-global-warming-the-solution/.
In 2009, Sealls won a science-reporting award: Michael Malone, “Climate Change Debate: Locally, It’s Still Often Too Hot to Handle,” Broadcasting & Cable, March 3, 2013.
FIVE: THE ARTICLES OF RAIN
In his 1615 memoir: M. John R. Loadman, Analysis of Rubber and Rubber-Like Polymers (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), 6.
His exhaustive report: Ibid., 6.
But neither he nor some of the best: The Rubber Age magazine, published by U.S. Rubber Co., July 10, 1917, 310.
He ended up with elastic: Thomas Hancock, Personal Narrative of the Origin and Progress of the Caoutchouc or India-Rubber Manufacture in England (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1857), 3.
Hancock had a mind for mechanics: Ibid., 2.
in 1795 Glasgow had a dozen: Thomas Martin Devine, Exploring the Scottish Past: Themes in the History of Scottish Society (East Lothian, U.K.: Tuckwell Press, 1995), 111.
He began traveling to Edinburgh: George Macintosh, Biographical Memoir of Charles Macintosh, Esq., F.R.S. (Glasgow: Private printing, W. G. Blackie & Co., 1847), 2–17.
Before Macintosh turned twenty: J. A. V. Butler, “John Maclean, Charles Macintosh, and an Early Chemical Society in Glasgow,” Journal of Chemical Education, January 1942, 43.
Macintosh had secret sources: Macintosh, Biographical Memoir, 17.
The elder Macintosh: Ibid., 118.
Thriving on Scotland’s rain and mist: Oliver Gilbert, Lichens: Naturally Scottish (Perth: Scottish Natural Heritage, 2004), 7.
Most cudbear manufacturers: Macintosh, Biographical Memoir, 81–82.
In 1819, Glasgow Gas Works: Ibid., 82.
Highly flammable, naphtha put the fire in “Greek fire”: Adrienne Mayor, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bo
mbs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2003), 241.
Macintosh heated the brew: Charles Macintosh, “Specification of His Patent for Water-Proof Double Fabrics,” Glasgow Mechanics’ Magazine and Annals of Philosophy, Volume 1 (Glasgow: W. R. McPhun, 1824), 405.
In 1822, he obtained patent number 4,804: Macintosh, Biographical Memoir, 82.
Should he fail: Ian Miller, “Macintosh Mill, Manchester,” Oxford Archaeology, http://thehumanjourney.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=61&Itemid=115.
Franklin wrote back requesting: Hancock, Personal Narrative, 23.
That would turn out to be Thomas Hancock: John Loadman and Francis James, The Hancocks of Marlborough: Rubber, Art, and the Industrial Revolution: A Family of Inventive Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
In 1825, Macintosh agreed: Hancock, Personal Narrative, 50.
It was not until Hancock’s articles began outselling Macintosh’s: Charles Slack, Noble Obsession: Charles Goodyear, Thomas Hancock and the Race to Unlock the Greatest Industrial Secret of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Hyperion, 2002), 65.
In 1831, he made Hancock a partner: Mechanics Magazine, no. 656, March 5, 1836, 470.
Men and women had worn cloaks, capes, and ground-sweeping mantles: Doreen Yarwood, Illustrated Encyclopedia of World Costume (London: B. T. Batsford, 1978), 91–94.
often oiled to deflect rain: “Clark’s Umbrella,” in Discovering Lewis & Clark (Washburn, N.D.: Lewis and Clark Fort Mandan Foundation, 2003), http://www.lewis-clark.org.
Some doctors were convinced: Macintosh, Biographical Memoir, 84.
“Complaints arising”: Hancock, Personal Narrative, 54.
Each stitch acted like a tiny straw: Ibid., 53.
In the early eighteenth century: Connelly, Bring Me Sunshine, 70–71.
Upper-crust women: “Clark’s Umbrella,” in Discovering Lewis & Clark.
The slave trader turned abolitionist John Newton: Connelly, Bring Me Sunshine, 73.
Seeing one “battered and ruined”: Ibid., 83.
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