Capítulo 4
Spiritual Downpours: Rain in Religious Traditions
In mid-nineteenth century Texas, Judge Robert "Three-Legged Willie" Williamson became famous not only as a brilliant lawyer and Texas Ranger despite his paralyzed right leg, but also as the region's go-to preacher for rain prayers. During the devastating 1840s drought-one of Texas's worst-Williamson would eloquently beseech the Lord for "bounteous rain that will make corn ears shake hands across the row," not merely "little rizzly-drizzly rains."
The Old Testament portrays God using rain as both blessing and punishment. As Rabbi Tanchum bar Chiyya put it, "the giving of Torah was a joy to Israel, but the falling of rain is a joy for all the world."
Some historians trace monotheism to agriculturalists in dry lands looking to the skies for life-giving rainfall, while polytheistic religions often emerged in monsoon-soaked regions. Geoscientist Peter Clift notes this contrast: in deserts, divine creation from nothing and eventual judgment seemed logical, while in abundant rainforests, endless cycles of life inspired different theological approaches.
In India, Hinduism's estimated one billion followers consider the rain-fed Ganges River holy. The blue-skinned Krishna, whose name means "dark as a storm cloud," was born during a terrific storm. In one famous story, Krishna convinces people to stop worshipping Indra, the rain god and king of gods. When Indra sends angry rains in retaliation, Krishna lifts Mount Govardhana as a gigantic umbrella to shelter his companions-an image depicted in countless Hindu artworks.
The Ganges River-personified as the goddess Ganga, a beautiful woman with a fish tail who rides a crocodilian water monster-draws millions of pilgrims to festivals like Kumbh Mela. In 2001, an estimated 70 million people gathered to bathe in its sacred waters. Throughout India, monsoon festivals celebrate the life-giving rains, including the Ambubachi Festival where devotees seek cloth moistened with the menstrual fluid of a goddess, believed to contain the power of the monsoons and fertility.
The greatest rain story of all time-the Great Flood-appears across numerous ancient cultures. In 1872, British museum worker George Smith discovered a fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh containing an account of the flood written at least a thousand years before the Bible's Genesis. This Mesopotamian version closely paralleled Noah's story: a divine warning about a coming flood, a chosen survivor building a wooden ark, saving animals, landing on a mountain, sending birds to find land, and receiving a promise that gods would never again destroy humanity with water.
Similar flood narratives spread throughout the ancient world-from Babylonians to Canaanites, Hittites to Greeks (where Zeus unleashed a flood that only Deucalion and Pyrrha survived), and Romans (where Jupiter Pluvius sent rain to wipe out evil humans). In Hindu mythology, Brahma becomes a fish to warn his son Manu of a worldwide flood.
In the 1920s, archaeologist Leonard Woolley excavated at Ur in Mesopotamia, discovering a ten-foot flood deposit that he believed proved the biblical deluge. His 1929 book "Ur of the Chaldees" became archaeology's most widely read work. However, later excavations revealed this was merely a localized flood, perhaps from a single Euphrates River breach.
More recently, geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman proposed that around 8,500 years ago, rising seas caused the Mediterranean to break through the Bosporus Strait into what was then a freshwater lake, creating today's Black Sea. This catastrophic flood might have inspired the epic flood narratives that permeate so many ancient cultures.
Capítulo 5
The Science of Storms: Understanding Rain Through History
In November 1703, a massive storm swept through London, beginning with strange gusts that Daniel Defoe witnessed firsthand. The storm-three hundred miles wide and the most destructive ever to hit Britain-killed 8,000 people at sea, 123 Londoners, destroyed 900 homes, and flattened 300,000 trees.
Defoe, recently released from prison for seditious libel and desperate for income, recognized an opportunity. He meticulously documented the devastation, interviewed eyewitnesses, and placed newspaper advertisements soliciting storm accounts from across England. The resulting work, "The Storm," became not just the first modern work of journalism but also the first modern weather report, blending scientific observation with moral reflection.
The earliest recorded rain science came from ancient Greeks who challenged Zeus's divine control of rainfall. Aristotle described rain as part of a sun-driven cycle he called "river of Ocean." Rainfall measurement began in India and Palestine, but systematic measurement emerged in 15th century Korea under King Sejong, who distributed rain gauges to every village.
European weather science lagged behind the East, as scientists risked accusations of witchcraft. Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli invented the barometer in 1643 but kept his experiments secret, fearing the Inquisition. He also poetically described humans as living "submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air."
Almost every meteorologist interviewed had either a childhood fascination with rainfall or a vivid weather experience. George James Symons, "the father of British rainfall," began observing weather as a child in 1850s London during severe droughts. By age twenty-one, he had built a network of rain-gauge readers across Britain.
By 1860, Symons was publishing rainfall data from five hundred stations, catching the attention of Robert Fitzroy, who had established Britain's first weather bureau. Fitzroy, the former captain of HMS Beagle during Darwin's voyage, had developed weather "forecasts" to prevent shipwrecks following the Royal Charter Storm that killed over 800 sailors.
Unlike the skeptical British, Americans embraced weather forecasting early. In Cincinnati, astronomer Cleveland Abbe developed a system of telegraphic weather reports and daily maps funded by the local Chamber of Commerce. His "probabilities" (forecasts) became immediately popular, earning him the nickname "Old Probabilities" or "Old Prob."
After 1,914 shipwrecks on the Great Lakes in 1869 alone, Congress established a national weather service. In 1870, President Grant signed a resolution placing meteorological observations under the War Department. General Albert J. Myer, the army's chief signal officer, hired Abbe and developed a system of warning flags for ports and cities.
Despite technological advances, rain remains difficult to predict. Modern forecasting has improved dramatically through Doppler radar, LIDAR, weather satellites, and supercomputers performing trillions of calculations per second. Today's four-day forecast is as accurate as a one-day forecast from thirty years ago, with particular improvements in hurricane prediction.
Yet rain continues to defy Big Data, routinely washing out zero-percent predictions. Human meteorologists improve rain-forecast accuracy by 25 percent over computer guidance alone. Physical rain measurement remains essential-as Colorado state climatologist Nolan Doesken discovered after a 1997 storm that Doppler failed to detect dumped fourteen inches on Fort Collins, causing deadly flash floods.
Capítulo 6
Staying Dry: The Quest for Waterproof Protection
In 1615, historian Fray Juan de Torquemada documented how native Mexicans created rainproof garments and shoes by tapping milky sap from jungle trees. Despite this indigenous knowledge, Europeans took centuries to develop effective waterproofing. Charles de la Condamine sent samples of the sap (which he named latex) to Paris in 1736, calling it caoutchouc or "the tree that weeps," but European scientists initially found it useful only for erasing pencil marks-giving it the name "rubber."
Despite the desperate need for rain protection during Europe's Little Ice Age, early attempts at rubberizing fabrics failed miserably-materials melted in heat, cracked in cold, and smelled terrible. In 1819, Thomas Hancock accidentally created elastic while attempting to make waterproof carriage roofs, but the true breakthrough came from Scottish chemist Charles Macintosh.
Born in 1766 to a Glasgow merchant and dye maker, Macintosh abandoned mercantile training to pursue chemistry. By age twenty-one, he established a plant manufacturing sal ammoniac from soot and urine-continuing his father's practice of paying Glasgow's poor for their waste to create dyes. Macintosh's waterproofing breakthrough came when he discovered that naphtha, a highly flammable by-product of coal gas production, could dissolve rubber. In 1822, he patented "Waterproof Double Textures" by sandwiching his rubber solution between two fabric layers, creating the first mackintosh raincoat.
Despite his invention's potential, Macintosh struggled to commercialize his waterproof fabric. Early products suffered from technical problems-the rubberized cloth sometimes melted in heat, stiffened in cold, and retained naphtha's nauseating odor. While fashionable consumers showed little interest, Macintosh found a market with the military, notably outfitting Royal Navy officer John Franklin's Arctic expedition in 1824.
Europeans initially disdained umbrellas as much as waterproof clothing. In early eighteenth-century Britain, only servants carried practical umbrellas, while upper-class women used decorative parasols. For gentlemen, carrying an umbrella signaled effeminacy-they preferred beaver-felt coats and Wellington hats.
Jonas Hanway, a social reformer, finally democratized the umbrella by defiantly carrying one everywhere for thirty years despite public ridicule. Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe also helped popularize umbrellas, depicting his castaway protagonist crafting one from goatskin that became "the most necessary thing I had about me, next to my gun." Londoners even began calling umbrellas "robinsons."
Japan's paper and bamboo umbrellas, known as wagasa, offered surprising durability despite their delicate appearance. Initially reserved for nobility with hereditary umbrella bearers following strict color protocols, they became widely popular by 1800 as daily accessories for all classes.
Waterproofed with lacquer and fortified with bamboo ribs, wagasa supported a thriving craft economy, particularly in Gifu City, where up to sixteen specialized artisans contributed to each umbrella's creation. At its peak in 1950, Gifu alone produced 15 million wagasa annually.
Early automobile drivers faced perilous conditions during rain, stretching dangerously out their doors to manually wipe windscreens. In 1903, Mary Anderson, a Birmingham society belle, invented the first manual windshield wiper after observing this dangerous practice in New York. Her patented design featured a rubber blade on a spring-loaded arm operated by a crank from inside the vehicle.
Engineers initially dismissed Anderson's invention as too distracting. Her patent expired before widespread adoption, and by 1916, most American vehicles included wipers as standard equipment without acknowledging her contribution.
Capítulo 7
America's Rain Visionaries: Jefferson's Weather Obsession
As a boy, Thomas Jefferson was captivated by a peak in Virginia's Blue Ridge foothills that seemed to rise above the storms. Born at his father's Shadwell plantation in 1743, young Tom would journey three miles to this enchanting summit whenever he returned from schooling. The 867-foot climb through cedars and clouds rewarded him with an elysian view that drew him deeply into "the movements of nature...in a never-ending circle."
This childhood fascination would shape Jefferson's lifelong obsession with natural phenomena-he meticulously recorded the first whip-poor-will songs, dogwood blooms, and for over five decades, nearly every raindrop that fell upon him. At twenty-five, Jefferson began leveling this mountaintop to create Monticello, his "little mountain" home, designed to look "down into the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet!"
Though the neoclassical design became America's most famous private residence, Jefferson's decision to build at such heights defied common sense. Unlike his Renaissance idol Palladio who preferred riverside villas, Jefferson ignored practical water concerns. Slaves were forced to dig sixty-five feet through mountain rock for water-twice the typical depth for Virginia wells. Despite his meticulous planning in other areas, Jefferson's fixation on Monticello's perfection blinded him to basic water needs. He put all his faith in the rain.
When British colonists first arrived in America, they expected climate patterns matching Europe's latitudes, but instead found extreme weather conditions during the Little Ice Age. European scientists like Buffon and de Pauw developed a "theory of degeneracy," claiming America's wet, miserable climate deformed its inhabitants and produced puny mammals. Jefferson was determined to disprove these claims through meticulous weather observations, purchasing instruments and recording data throughout his life. His calculations were remarkably accurate-estimating Virginia's annual rainfall at 47 inches compared to modern measurements of 46 inches.
Rain has been the perpetual nemesis of architects throughout history. Leon Battista Alberti portrayed rain as architecture's great enemy-"always prepared to wreak mischief," infiltrating the smallest openings to ultimately bring "ruin and destruction." Despite technological advances, we still haven't perfected the roof.
Frank Lloyd Wright's aesthetic masterpieces were notoriously leaky, earning nicknames like "Rising Mildew" for Fallingwater. Yet Wright didn't overlook rain-he celebrated it. At Florida Southern College, America's thunderstorm capital, Wright designed covered walkways hanging inches from sidewalks so people could experience rain without getting wet. He often omitted rain gutters because he wanted to showcase nature's drama rather than hide it.
Thomas Jefferson's cisterns at Monticello embodied his rain paradox-loving the element yet struggling to harness it. Despite using Roman cement meant to be waterproof, his cisterns never sealed completely. Only two of four held water reliably during years of drought. His correspondence rarely mentioned the practical hardships this caused his family or slaves, who hauled water up the steep mountain when wells ran dry.
Jefferson never regretted building on his enchanting mountain. In 1816, U.S. Attorney General Richard Rush visited and compared Monticello to Mount Olympus, with Jefferson as Jupiter (the Roman god of rain). This characterization captured Jefferson's relationship with rain-scientific in his weather logs yet defiant of climate's reality, building a home with poetic views rather than reliable water, much as Americans would later develop in flood plains and hurricane paths.
Capítulo 8
Rain Follows the Plow: The Great American Myth
In his letters to his wife Mattie, Union veteran Uriah Oblinger frequently wrote about rain. After settling in Nebraska, he found himself down to his last dollars, trading his wagon and shotgun for cash to continue his homestead search. He convinced himself a creek wasn't essential-they would dig a well and haul water with a windlass instead.
Fillmore County, Nebraska lay in what would become known as the Rainwater Basin, where thousands of shallow wetlands would fill during rainy periods. Though dust still blew fiercely across the land, Uriah and other settlers believed this was no desert. The recurrent storms seemed proof that settling this once-desolate land was part of God's plan-a belief reinforced by popular imagery like John Gast's painting "American Progress," which depicted America's manifest destiny spreading westward.
As settlers pushed beyond the 98th meridian, a curious phenomenon occurred-the rain seemed to follow them. This observation evolved from superstition into theory, eagerly promoted by railroad companies seeking to populate the Great Plains. University of Nebraska scientists Samuel Aughey and Charles Dana Wilber gave it scientific legitimacy, claiming that plowing the soil increased its ability to absorb moisture, which then returned to the atmosphere as rain. "Rain follows the plow" became a powerful slogan in promotional literature for western settlement.
Uriah built a sod house for Mattie and baby Ella, cutting tough prairie grass four inches deep and a foot wide into strips up to four feet long. He laid these grass-side down in three thick rows to create walls sturdy enough to withstand Nebraska's constant winds. As he worked, he worried about both the fierce gusts that nearly blew him off the walls and the lack of rain affecting his newly planted wheat and potatoes.
The evening after Uriah's Easter Sunday letter in 1873, a violent storm answered his prayers for rain. What began as steady rainfall turned violent overnight with gale-force winds that knocked out telegraph service across Nebraska. The rain transformed to sleet, then to blinding snow that raged for eighty hours. Thousands of livestock froze to death, along with several ranchers, buffalo hunters, and settlers caught in unfamiliar drifts. This devastating weather event gave birth to a new word: "blizzard."
Mattie and Ella arrived at their Nebraska home in May 1873 during considerable rainfall. Despite the sodden conditions preventing corn planting and the primitive sod house lacking proper floors, Mattie embraced frontier life with remarkable enthusiasm. Within five years, the Oblinger farm thrived with wheat, corn, oats, barley, livestock, and fruit trees. For the first time in his life, Uriah achieved financial comfort.
The wet cycle that had blessed the plains during settlement wouldn't last forever. By the late 1880s and 1890s, the customary arid climate returned with devastating consequences. Had settlers been able to read the tree rings of Nebraska's red cedars and ponderosa pines, they would have known that years with twenty to thirty inches of rainfall were rare exceptions to the thirteen-inch average. The plains burned brown again as corn withered in the fields. Between 1888 and 1892, half the population of western Kansas and Nebraska abandoned their homesteads and returned east.
The true tragedy stemmed not from nature but from the national conceit that Americans were destined to control even the rain-bringing it to dry regions and holding it back from wet ones. This hubris would lead to even greater disasters in the coming century.
Capítulo 9
When Skies Fall Strange: Extraordinary Rain Phenomena
On a June day in 1954, Sylvia Mowday and her children were caught in a most unusual rainstorm in Sutton Coldfield, England. As they ran for shelter, they realized thousands of tiny frogs were falling from the sky along with the raindrops. Such bizarre precipitation has been reported throughout history-from Greek literature to modern times.
Eugene Willis Gudger, an ichthyologist with the American Museum of Natural History, authenticated seventy-one accounts of fish rain spanning from 300 A.D. through the 1920s. Though he never witnessed such a phenomenon himself, he couldn't "disregard the evidence recorded by scientific men." One eyewitness account from Providence, Rhode Island in 1900 described "squirming perch and bull-pouts" covering about a quarter of an acre, which a local reporter collected by the bucketful.
Gudger believed there was only one explanation: "High winds, particularly whirlwinds, pick up water, fishes and all, and carry them inland" until they fall to earth. Other peculiar rains throughout history have included hay, snakes, maggots, seeds, nuts, stones, and even shredded meat. In 1902, a massive dust storm from Illinois collided with rain clouds over the Eastern Seaboard, resulting in mud rain that "smeared" clothes and "soiled everything exposed to it."
Charles Hoy Fort, born in Albany in 1874, became the most prolific chronicler of strange rain phenomena. After failing as a science fiction writer, Fort created "the first book of oddities" with his 1919 work "The Book of the Damned"-a forerunner to collections like The Guinness Book of World Records. Fort spent years meticulously collecting some 60,000 newspaper clippings about strange rains and other unusual events from archives in New York and London.
Many of Fort's documented phenomena, including colored rains, have since been scientifically acknowledged. His collection of reports on yellow rain gained relevance when Secretary of State Alexander Haig cited such phenomena as evidence of Soviet chemical weapons in the 1980s, though biologists later attributed it to massive honeybee defecation flights.
Rain's quality reflects the air it travels through, often carrying pollution back to earth. After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, survivors reported black rains that fell for up to seven hours. Some desperately thirsty children drank this contaminated rain and quickly died.
Charles Fort documented numerous black rains that fell over the British Isles in the nineteenth century. Shepherds called the inky precipitation "moorgrime" when it blackened their sheep's fleeces-early evidence that industrial emissions could travel long distances. Charles Dickens captured London's polluted atmosphere in "Bleak House" (1853), describing "flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes" and fog that grew "browner and browner" toward the city center until it became "rusty-black."
London's Great Fog of December 1952 began when cold, damp fog settled over the city, absorbing smoke and soot. When winds stopped and warm high pressure trapped the colder air below, the toxic smog thickened until visibility dropped to near zero. The catastrophe killed 12,000 people-4,000 during the five days it lingered and an estimated 8,000 more in following months-making it Britain's worst peacetime disaster.
Acid rain, first discovered in 1852 by English chemist Robert Angus Smith in Manchester, remained largely ignored for a century despite his six-hundred-page book on the subject. By the 1960s, its effects became visible in Germany's Black Forest, where a third of the fir trees died within a decade. In 1974, ecologists F. Herbert Bormann and Gene Likens published findings connecting widespread forest and fish deaths to acid rain dispersed over long distances by fossil fuel burning.
While acid rain has decreased in North America and Europe through successful environmental regulations, it's increasing elsewhere. In China, the ancient Leshan Buddha is slowly corroding from acid rain. Human activities alter rainfall in numerous unexpected ways-from agricultural irrigation shifting U.S. rainfall patterns to cities influencing local precipitation by blocking sea breezes or splitting storms with skyscrapers.
Capítulo 10
The Future of Rain in a Changing Climate
On Memorial Day weekend in 2013, Dave Tzilkowski and Jillane Hixson were trapped in their Colorado home for fifteen hours as a massive dust storm-not the rain they had been praying for-pounded their windows with sixty-mile-an-hour winds. Similar dust storms have plagued southeastern Colorado since 2011, part of a drought that climate scientists consider more extreme than the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
While southeastern Colorado suffered historic drought, the northern Front Range experienced biblical flooding in September 2013. Eight days of relentless rain turned creeks into raging rivers, with floodwaters rising waist-deep in neighborhoods. Eight people died, including sweethearts Wesley Quinlan and Wiyanna Nelson. The Boulder area broke every rainfall record in its books-heaviest rain in a day, month and year.
These extremes exemplify the paradoxical nature of climate change impacts: extreme drought in one region while another experiences unprecedented flooding. While individual weather disasters can't be directly attributed to climate change, scientists like Martin Hoerling at NOAA explain that all weather now occurs in a different climate than a century ago. As Earth warms, more water vapor forms in the atmosphere, causing greater evaporation and more rain where water exists, while making dry areas hotter and drier.
At Britain's Met Office, founded in 1854 by Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy, scientists like Mark McCarthy analyze the nation's extensive rainfall records dating to 1766. During my visit, England and Wales were experiencing their wettest winter since records began, with southern England receiving double its normal rainfall. Climate scientists now work to attribute extreme weather events to climate change, finding that six of twelve extreme events from 2012 carried the fingerprint of human influence.
While climate skeptics point to past climate swings as evidence against human-caused warming, Congress has shown both success and failure in addressing environmental challenges. The 1990 Clean Air Act amendments successfully cut sulfur dioxide emissions in half through market-based cap-and-trade programs-ironically now rejected by conservative politicians. Congress has also ignored scientific advice, as when it dismissed John Wesley Powell's warnings about farming in the arid West and Gifford Pinchot's concerns about the "levees only" strategy on the Mississippi.
As scientists consider geoengineering solutions like atmospheric sulfur injection, they acknowledge potential drawbacks, including reduced rainfall in Europe and North America-reinforcing Powell's warning that "the weather of the globe is a complex whole."
I arrived in Meghalaya-Sanskrit for "abode of clouds"-during an unusually early monsoon season that had covered all of India by June 15, something not seen since 1961. The timing seemed perfect for my visit to Earth's rainiest place, where the village of Cherrapunji holds the world record: 1,042 inches in a single year (1860-1861). Modern Cherrapunji and neighboring Mawsynram average 470 inches annually, compared to Mobile, Alabama's mere 65 inches.
Despite my expectations of constant deluge, I arrived during an unusually dry June. The rainiest place on Earth boasts the greenest horizon I've ever seen-so lush the British called it "Scotland of the East." The landscape bursts with color: yellow trumpet flowers grow into gnarled trunks exploding with blossoms, roses thrive beneath coconut palms and jackfruit trees, and wild flowers run amok as if drunk on rain.
In the world's rainiest place, I found myself ironically praying for precipitation. June should bring nearly 100 inches of rain, but we were halfway through with only 23 inches fallen. I hiked through villages where women carry water buckets to community taps-the rainiest place on Earth increasingly prone to water shortages. Locals recall childhoods when steady rains prevented walking home from school for weeks, when no one needed fans or sun umbrellas. "It used to rain steady, for days. If it rains now, it will be fierce all at once, and then this," they say, pointing to the bright sky.
Our journey through rain's past and present reveals both warning and hope. As climate change intensifies, our relationship with rain grows increasingly complex. Yet understanding this relationship-from ancient civilizations to modern cities-offers valuable lessons for adaptation and resilience. The rain that falls upon us connects us to the earliest moments of Earth's history and will shape our collective future in ways we are only beginning to understand.
