Connelly celebrates Jonas Hanway: Ibid., 74–75.
Crusoe describes his umbrella: Daniel Defoe, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London: S. O. Beeton, 1862), 134.
He died three days later: Nick Holdsworth and Robert Mendick, “Prime Suspect in Georgi Markov ‘Umbrella Poison’ Murder Tracked Down to Austria,” The Telegraph, March 23, 2013.
The earliest artifact of an actual umbrella: Julia Meech, Rain and Snow: The Umbrella in Japanese Art (New York: Japan Society, 1993), 36–38.
In Egypt, the umbrella was associated: Ibid., 37.
The umbrella was especially significant in China: Ibid., 37–38.
Meet Mary Anderson: Clarke Stallworth, “Southern Belle Invented Wiper for Windshield,” Birmingham News, February 20, 1977.
By 1916, most vehicles: James Scoltock, “Milestones: Mary Anderson,” Automotive Engineer, December 2011, 7.
Her patent, too, expired: Arvids Linde, Preston Tucker & Others: Tales of Brilliant Automotive Innovators & Innovations (Dorchester, U.K.: Veloce Automotive Publishers, 2011), 149.
Likewise when army guards: Hancock, Personal Narrative, 55.
Charles Macintosh lived to see: Ibid.
Goodyear lost a legal battle with Hancock: Slack, Noble Obsession, 235.
a twenty-one-year-old McDonald’s advertising secretary: Jamie Fox, “A Meal Disguised as a Sandwich: The Big Mac,” 2009, collected for the Literary and Cultural Heritage Map of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Center for the Book, http://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/BigMac.html.
Apple’s Jef Raskin code-named a secret computer project: Andy Hertzfeld, Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Media, 2004), 272.
The British slang dictionary: Jonathan Bernstein, Knickers in a Twist: A Dictionary of British Slang (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2006), 29.
Their family-owned company: Robert Gore, induction, National Inventors Hall of Fame, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, http://www.invent.org/hall_of_fame/1_3_0_induction_gore.asp.
After much trial and flooded-tent error: Kristin Hostetter, “Gore-Tex, the Fabric That Breathes,” Backpacker, April 1998, 70.
Companies all over the world: Ibid.
Daniel was the spoiled youngest: Author interview with Daniel Dunko, Cumbernauld, Scotland, November 19, 2014.
My tour guide was: Author interview with Willie Ross, Cumbernauld, Scotland, November 20, 2014.
SIX: FOUNDING FORECASTER
As a boy, Tom Jefferson was drawn to a peak: Thomas Jefferson, “Head and Heart Letter” to Maria Cosway, October 12, 1786, Paris.
The vista drew the boy: Thomas Jefferson, “A Memoir of the Discovery of Certain Bones of a Quadruped of the Clawed Kind in the Western Parts of Virginia,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 4 (1799), 255–56.
Year upon year: Charles A. Miller, Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 41.
“How sublime to look down”: Jefferson, “Head and Heart Letter.”
Even Jefferson’s admiring biographer: Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time: Jefferson the Virginian (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1948), 144.
But he ignored his Renaissance idol’s: William Howard Adams, Jefferson’s Monticello (New York: Abbeville Press, 1983), 51.
More recently, ten of the thirteen original British colonies: Arthur C. Benke, Rivers of North America: The Natural History (Burlington, Mass.: Elsevier Academic Press, 2005), 21.
When it came time to sink a well: Jack McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1988), 156.
When the first British colonists set out across the Atlantic Ocean: Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period,” American Historical Review, vol. 87, no. 5 (December 1982), 1262.
Temperatures plunged: Thomas Purvis, Colonial America to 1763 (New York: Facts on File, 1999), 1.
By Thomas Jefferson’s day: Edwin T. Martin, Thomas Jefferson: Scientist (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952), chapters 6, 7, and 8, details Buffon’s theories and the responses from the New World, including Jefferson’s.
This “theory of degeneracy”: Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (New York and London: D. Appleton and Co., updated 7th edition, 1915), xiv.
Buffon’s influential books: Martin, Thomas Jefferson: Scientist, 155.
America is “overrun with serpents, lizards”: Ibid., 160.
They debated the inaccuracies: Ibid., 192.
Jefferson invested in rain gauges: Thomas Jefferson, edited by Edwin Morris Betts, Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Book: 1766–1824 (Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1999), 69.
And often, they were followed by brilliant sun and the rainbows: Thomas Jefferson to William Dunbar, January 12, 1801, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.
He estimated average rainfall: Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Book, 625. Jefferson made this analysis based on records kept by Colonel James Madison, father of the president, whose rainfall data had the advantage of being collected in the same spot year after year, as opposed to Jefferson’s dragging of gauges from Monticello to Philadelphia to Paris to the new federal city of Washington.
Modern meteorologists: Charlottesville, Virginia, Period of Record General Climate Summary—Precipitation, 1893 to 2012, Southeast Regional Climate Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In London: South East England Precipitation Averages, 1981–2010, Met Office, United Kingdom.
The architectural historian: McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello, 156–57.
Cisterns, ranging from the simplest clay pots: Larry Mays, George P. Antoniou, and Andreas N. Angelakis, “History of Water Cisterns: Legacies and Lessons,” Water, vol. 5, no. 4 (2013), 1923.
He spent years struggling: “Cisterns,” Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, http://www.monticello.org/site/house-and-gardens/cisterns.
But, contrary to the evoking: Peter J. Hatch, A Rich Spot of Earth: Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary Garden at Monticello (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012), 89–90.
In the first modern treatise of architecture: Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books (Boston: MIT Press, 1988), 27.
Rain can warp, swell, discolor: Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (New York: Viking, 1994), 114.
As a general rule, the showier the house: Ibid., 115–16.
Brand found some 80 percent: Ibid., 58.
Its owner, Pittsburgh businessman Edgar Kaufmann Sr.: Ibid.
On a “beautiful little ravine”: Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Wright: Building for Democracy (Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 2004), 45.
“Dammit, Frank—it’s leaking on my desk!”: Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 372.
Despite all the hardships: Adams, Jefferson’s Monticello, 46–47.
He would marvel: Charles B. Sanford, The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1988), 72.
Two years later, he sold: Gaye Wilson, “Jefferson’s Long Look West,” Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s Monticello, Summer 2000.
His official instructions: Thomas Jefferson, “Instructions to Lewis,” in Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804–1806, vol. 7 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1905), appendix, 249.
“One wants new words”: Walt Whitman, “Specimen Days,” The Complete Prose Works of Walt Whitman, vol. 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902), 268.
He described the Great Plains: Major S. H. Long, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains Performed in the Years 1819, 1820, vol. III (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1823), 236.
“The traveller who shall”: Ibid.,
24.
Now a long humid cycle: John C. Hudson, Across This Land: A Regional Geography of the United States and Canada (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 284; and Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York: Penguin Books, updated edition, 1993), 35–36.
Anyone willing to head west: “An Act to Secure Homesteads to Actual Settlers on the Public Domain,” Chapter 75, 12 Stat. 392 (1862, repealed 1976).
A line down the middle: J. W. Powell, Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1878), 1–3.
Truth was: George Cameron Coggins, Charles F. Wilkinson, and John D. Leshy, Federal Public Land and Resources Law (New York: Foundation Press, 2002), 79.
Even in what Powell called: Powell, Report on the Lands of the Arid Region, 3.
“too much planning”: Donald Worster, speaking to NPR’s Howard Berkes, NPR’s Water in the West series, “The Vision of John Wesley Powell,” August 26, 2003.
SEVEN: RAIN FOLLOWS THE PLOW
“Sun rose beautiful”: Uriah W. Oblinger to Mattie V. Thomas, October 1–2, 1866, Nebraska State Historical Society.
“Is it raining”: Uriah W. Oblinger to Mattie V. Oblinger, September 29, 1872, Nebraska State Historical Society.
When the conquistador: Jane Braxton Little, “Saving the Ogallala Aquifer,” Scientific American, Special Edition, vol. 19, no. 1 (March 2009), 32–39.
“It seems this desert”: Uriah W. Oblinger to Mattie V. Oblinger and Ella Oblinger, February 9, 1873, Nebraska State Historical Society.
Aughey reported on several “facts of nature”: John Francis Freeman, High Plains Horticulture: A History (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2008), 26.
But, as long as they were blessed: Uriah W. Oblinger to Mattie V. Oblinger and Ella Oblinger, April 13–18, 1873, Nebraska State Historical Society.
Several ranchers died: Steven Rinella, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon (New York: Random House, 2008), 176.
Never known was the death toll: Addison E. Shelton, ed., “The April Blizzard, 1873,” Journal of Nebraska History and Record of Pioneer Days, vol. III, no. 3 (July–September 1920), 1–2.
It was thought to come: Jordan Almond, Dictionary of Word Origins: A History of the Words, Expressions and Clichés We Use (New York: Citadel Press, 1995), 37–38.
At the Omaha Republican: Shelton, ed., “The April Blizzard, 1873,” 1.
Sam “seems some”: Uriah W. Oblinger to Mattie V. Oblinger and Ella Oblinger, April 13–18, 1873.
It wasn’t the novelty: Mattie V. Oblinger to Thomas family, May 19, 1873; and Mattie V. Oblinger to George W. Thomas, Grizzie B. Thomas, and Wheeler Thomas Family, June 16, 1873, Nebraska State Historical Society.
“It seems as though we are destined”: Uriah W. Oblinger to Mattie V. Oblinger and Ella Oblinger, February 9, 1873, Nebraska State Historical Society.
The financier Jay Gould: Clark C. Spence, The Rainmakers: American “Pluviculture” to World War II (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), 6.
“I feel that it is not possible”: Uriah W. Oblinger to Thomas Family, September 26, 1880.
Between 1888 and 1892: Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press), 340.
“The farmers helpless”: Stephen Crane, Crane: Prose and Poetry (New York: Library of America, 1984), 689.
There, the river finishes: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans District, “The Mississippi River Basin,” http://www.mvn.usace.army.mil/Missions/MississippiRiverFloodControl/MississippiRiverTributaries/MississippiDrainageBasin.aspx.
For millennia, the Mississippi: Mikko Saikku, This Delta, This Land: An Environmental History of the Yazoo-Mississippi Floodplain (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 36–37, 138.
“Without floods”: Christine A. Klein and Sandra B. Zellmer, Mississippi River Tragedies: A Century of Unnatural Disaster (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 37.
In the sixteenth century: Saikku, This Delta, This Land, 140.
Native people: Ibid., 62.
When French settlers floated down: Klein and Zellmer, Mississippi River Tragedies, 34.
Twelve feet of water: Ibid., 38–39.
The environmental historian Worster: Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, paperback edition, 1992), 20.
Ten years later: Susan Scott Parrish, “Faulkner and the Outer Weather of 1927,” American Literary History, vol. 24, no. 1 (Spring 2012), 35.
He uttered the words: Klein and Zellmer, Mississippi River Tragedies, 67.
“When it rains, it pours”: “Morton Salt: When It Rains, It Pours,” Huffington Post, March 14, 2012.
Yet another was close: John M. Barry, “After the Deluge,” Smithsonian, November 2005.
Gauge readings: Risk Management Solutions, “The 1927 Great Mississippi Flood 80-Year Retrospective,” 2007, 2.
each greater than any seen in the preceding ten years: Barry, “After the Deluge.”
New Orleans broke records: Klein and Zellmer, Mississippi River Tragedies, 67.
floodwaters rose phenomenally: Saikku, This Delta, This Land, 156.
“These heights changed the equations”: John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 40.
Thousands of men worked desperately: Ibid., 202–3.
“Refugees coming into Jackson”: Ibid., 202.
The dynamiting left scars: Risk Management Solutions, “The 1927 Great Mississippi Flood 80-Year Retrospective,” 6.
Some 637,000 peopl: Saikku, This Delta, This Land, 159.
The river and its tributaries: Barry, “After the Deluge.”
Barry wrote that the government: Ibid.
mud-caked and barren: Risk Management Solutions, “The 1927 Great Mississippi Flood 80-Year Retrospective,” 7.
“The removal of forests”: Powell, Report on the Lands of the Arid Region, 76.
“It’s a man-made disaster”: Barry, “After the Deluge.”
Jeffersonian dream of land-based democracy: Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 11, 47.
In 1925, Ford Motor Company’s: “Ford Makes 500,000 Tractors,” Engineering News-Record, vol. 94 (1925), 1078.
Along the Mississippi River: Worster, Dust Bowl, 11.
The Dakotas became as arid as the Sonoran Desert: Ibid., 12.
Two summers later: Ibid.
Grasshoppers swarmed: Ibid.
The winds that nearly blew Uriah: Ibid., 15.
With neither the prairie grass: Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006), 10.
“We watched that thing”: Interview with J. R. Davison, “Surviving the Dust Bowl,” American Experience, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/interview/dustbowl-witness-jr-davison/.
Ships three hundred miles: Worster, Dust Bowl, 13–14.
Midafternoon, the warm air: Ibid., 18.
“It got so black”: Alan Lomax interview with Woody Guthrie, March 21, 1940, record at American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, transcribed at http://soundportraits.org/on-air/woody_guthrie/transcript.php.
Those hardest hit: Saikku, This Delta, This Land, 157.
“People, since its raining”: “Blind” Lemon Jefferson, “Rising High Water Blues,” 1927.
“We had no rain”: Uriah W. Oblinger to Charlie Thomas, October 27, 1896, Nebraska State Historical Society.
EIGHT: THE RAINMAKERS
He had sent ahead a freight car: Robert St. George Dyrenforth, “Report of the Agent of the Department of Agriculture for Making Experiments in the Production of Rainfall,” U.S. Senate, 52
nd Congress, First Session, 1891–1892, 5–13.
Dyrenforth, his odd freight: James Rodger Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 66.
Sporting the pith helmets: Photograph III, “The Party,” in Dyrenforth, “Report of the Agent,” 18.
Also on this first line: Dyrenforth, “Report of the Agent,” 13.
Without enough men: Ibid., 14.
“The delight, nay, enthusiasm”: John Seelye, “ ‘Rational Exultation’: The Erie Canal Celebration,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, vol. 94, no. 2 (October 1984), 259.
When the men at the second cannon: Ronald E. Shaw, Erie Water West: A History of the Erie Canal, 1792–1854 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1966), 185.
The smallest villages were determined: Peter L. Bernstein, Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 313.
Clutching the end: Connelly, Bring Me Sunshine, 56–57.
From the time of Plutarch: Spence, The Rainmakers, 22.
By the eighteenth century: Ibid., 24.
In 1842, the U.S. government had hired its first: Ibid., 10.
A long curtain of showers: William B. Meyer, Americans and Their Weather (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 86.
The idea especially alarmed: Ibid., 87.
“He might enshroud us in continual clouds”: Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, quoted in Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 55.
“I would not trust such a power to this Congress”: Senator Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina, quoted in Meyer, Americans and Their Weather, 88.
The only redeeming influence: Spence, The Rainmakers, 7.
John Wesley Powell said as much: Powell, Report on the Lands of the Arid Region, 74–75.
The first champion of the theory: Spence, The Rainmakers, 24.
J. C. Lewis “took note”: J. C. Lewis, “Rain Following the Discharge of Ordnance,” American Journal of Science and Arts, vol. 32 (November 1861), 296.
“The discharge of heavy artillery”: Ibid.
Fighting in the godforsaken mud: Spence, The Rainmakers, 24.
“This fact was well noticed”: Edward Powers, War and the Weather, or, the Artificial Production of Rain (Chicago, 1871; Wisconsin: Delavan, 1890), 152.
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