Rain was invented in Polynesia in about 6000B.C. It first appears in cave paintings on Samoa dating from that period.
“It’s difficult to be certain,“ says archaeometeorologist, Professor Nonkenstein of Vermont University, “but it appears to be quite a heavy squall.“ Most experts agree, although TV’s Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen claims the brushstrokes indicate a light drizzle at most, that would barely cause a panic at a picnic. Llewelyn-Bowen is, famously, a gravity-denier and refuses to accept the concept of ‘rainfall’ and instead uses ‘water-relocation’ whenever there’s a shower in his neighbourhood.
“One of the reasons the dinosaurs were wiped out by the meteorite was that they weren’t used to looking upwards,“ Stig Wainthrop, palaeontologist and amateur florist, explained how the realisation that rain didn’t occur until eight thousand years ago helped to fix the ‘plot-hole’ in the giant meteor theory for the dinosaur’s mass-extinction. “For decades,“ explained Wainthrop, “those that had a problem with the meteor theory would say, ‘why didn’t they just move a bit to the left?’ or ‘why didn’t they just pop inside for a bit?’ but when we realised that precipitation was a relatively new phenomenon given the lifespan of the Earth, we felt much more confident in saying ‘they simply didn’t see it’.“
There was evaporation pre-Polynesia, but such water vapour would drift across to mountains and then slide down again. The word ‘water’ comes from the ancient Sumerian, named after their equivalent to Poseidon, Wada, meaning ‘one who slides’.
Mist, as any primary school student could tell you, was invented by the Romans. It was well known that boiling water would create water vapour, but this would dissipate far too quickly because it was so agitated – unless in an enclosed space e.g. Caldarium or Laconicum. Roman scholars realised that in order to keep water vapour loitering in an outside environment, you would have to agitate water less vigorously than when applying heat. Therefore the Romans took to rubbing water. Two hundred legionaries rubbing a lake could create enough mist to mask a phalanx attacking a small barbarian settlement. Cassius Dio in book 39 of his ‘Histora Romana’ describes the Gaulish leader Vercingetorix becoming “most vexed in his countenance when 200 Roman soldiers downed their pillums and started rubbing puddles before seemingly disappearing into clouds. He did declare ‘It is the very thing we fear! The sky falling on our heads!’ He did surrender shortly afterwards at Alesia.“
One of the major factors for the growth of the British Empire was of course its dominance over the world of precipitation. Drizzle (1842) was invented by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and was a by-product of his work on the SS Great Britain. Brunel had been working on a way of utilising steam in the folding of napkins for the captain’s table when it began to fall lightly.
Brunel’s great rival and friend, Robert Stephenson, in trying to refine Brunel’s work created mizzle (1843), claiming that ‘the smaller gauged water droplets led to more precise creases in cotton, linen and other assorted cloth.
Snoop Dogg’s homage to the great engineers of the Industrial Revolution ‘Snoop’s Steam Dream’ referenced this precipitation battle: ‘for shizzle, the drizzle and mizzle is the bizzle’. The lyrics in the same song about Scottish engineer John Scott Russell were less well received: ‘don’t hustle J.S. Russell or ya better muzzle this Dogg’s fuzzle’ – as they appear nonsensical or lifted directly from Dr. Seuss.
In a desperate attempt to break the shackles of their identity as a British colony and to assert their independence, the newly formed Union of States commissioned the Committee of Five to not only draft up a declaration of independence but also to create an American form of precipitation. The Committee of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman took the challenge most seriously. Having flown a kite in a thunderstorm, Franklin felt that he was best placed to design and define a new form of rain. “I feel it incumbent upon myself to envisage for this great burgeoning nation of ours a form of rain that symbolises the hope and equality that is at the heart of the people of this land and to . . .“ By the time that Franklin had got to this part of the sentence, the other four had left the room to lob water at each other until the Muse of Showers landed upon their collective shoulders. When he eventually shut up, Franklin decided that rain that could be weaponised would be the best way to go forward and most apt way to sum up the American spirit. Hail was what he developed, and it proved so popular that one of the initial amendments to the constitution was that ‘every American has the right to bear frozen rain and lob it at the British’. Of course, using rain as a weapon to stop the British is like using dry twigs to stop a fire.
Currently, at Durham University, there is a team of scientists who have been sponsored by Kellogg’s to develop 6G rain. The concept is that this rain would be capable of arriving on the ground before it left the clouds. The ECB are worried that this would lead to cricket matches having to be abandoned as you’d have confused ground staff fighting against their instincts trying to keep the covers on until the rainclouds arrived.
At the recent Republican Congress there was a lot of excitement amongst delegates when Senator Blaze McGuigan of Idaho declared that school children in his State were being rained on by rain that only fell from the left, and that this was clearly a socialist plot. Such association of rain with left-wing politics was not new. It was widely believed in right leaning media outlets during the 1970s in America that sleet was developed by the USSR to ruin wheat harvests and to indoctrinate the disco-generation.
Purple rain isn’t officially recognised as a form of precipitation by the Society of International Meteorological Organisations of all Nations (SIMON). SIMON says that it isn’t a scientifically supported phenomenon. SIMON says that to be recognised as a legitimate form of rain it has to have been observed on at least a dozen occasions and independently verified by at least three meteorological organisations. Touch your nose.
Spitting (the rain form, rather than the communication method of punks) is seen as being on the very edge of rain, the cusp, the pre-pubertal stage. It’s the caterpillar in its cocoon before emerging the fully formed butterfly of precipitation. In certain countries (Belgium, Vanuata, Narnia), rather than rain it’s classed as a dessert topping – mainly for tax purposes in Belgium. “If I as one human can produce more moisture in half an hour of jogging then it cannot be classed as precipitation,“ declared Jan van der Hoof, Belgian Minister for Weather, during a speech he gave for milkmaids in a gymnasium in Ghent. He received a ten-minute standing ovation and four pints of semi-skimmed.
Despite what Gazza or Lindisfarne tell you, fog has legally been the property of the Prince of Wales since 1793 when King George III gifted it to his eldest son and whoever held that title in perpetuity. Despite this act occurring whilst the monarch thought he was an elderberry bush, it was legally binding and remains so unto this day. Technically, the Prince of Wales is allowed to charge anyone tuppence anytime they enter fog, but Prince William has currently declined to enforce this law, though has forewarned Prince Harry to steer clear of any Sherlock Holmes reconstructions or face a mediocre bill.
Fret. Rather than falling down, it drifts sideways – it’s the crab of precipitation. It moves akin to the bishop in chess. It was designed initially by Nordic sailors to hide illicit cargo such as thick woollen jumpers and unregistered melancholy. There are very strict tax laws on imported melancholy in Scandinavia in order to protect the home-grown melancholy industry, it being one of their major exports.
The confusion that surrounds the origin of ‘snow’ is wrapped up in a dynastic dispute. In his autobiography ‘Dashing through the Snow’ (Penguin 2004), British TV journalist Peter Snow claims that he had invented the weather concept whilst at his Uncle’s, George D’Oyly Snow (Bishop of Whitby), one Christmas. His cousin, British TV journalist Jon Snow (son of the Bishop of Whitby), disputes this, claiming in his autobiography ‘There’s Snow Business Like Snow Business’ (Penguin 2005), that he himself had invented it at the same Christmas gathering, just after the King’s speech. Peter’s son, pretend historian Dan Snow, cites a reference in the appendix to George RR Martin’s ‘A Game of Thrones’ novel that states that the character of Jon Snow (not to be confused with British TV journalist and son of the Bishop of Whitby, Jon Snow) was named after the character Chrissy Snow from TV’s ‘Three’s Company’ who Martin believed to be the inventor of snow. Though this in itself is disputed by Don Nicholl, one of the developers of ‘Three’s a Crowd’ who stated that he had based the character’s name on that of country musician ‘Hank Snow’ who he believed to have invented the weather phenomenon shortly before World War II at a concert in Milwaukee. However, this theory has been called in to question by former Prime Minister, Sir Tony Blair, whose own research has led to him putting forth in a speech to leaders of the Middle East in 2010 that the late British novelist and scientist, C.P Snow was the inventor of snow. This research has been dismissed as ‘amateurish’ and ‘having as much academic weight as a duck’s insights into the works of Tolstoy’ by TV chef, Gary Rhodes. Rhodes finally closed this entire 20th century explanations for the origin of snow debate when he pointed out that ‘A Christmas Carol’ was written in 1843.
Finally, the phrase ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’ comes from an unfortunate incident at an animal rescue centre in 1963 involving an unguarded industrial sized fan, a pound of sausages and forty-three abandoned pets, and resulted in a scene akin to that moment in ‘Carrie’.
Treatises of Gloria 